Items

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  2022-05-11

  Fact Checkers

  This is an Instagram post by covid_antivax. This post is in criticism of social media removing posts deemed "misinformation" about COVID and the vaccine. The tags from this user, like #depopulation, suggest that the goal of COVID and the vaccines is to reduce the population size. The censoring of information regarding the virus and the vaccine has been troublesome for myself. I do not think it is the right of social media to dictate what can and cannot be said, barring anything illegal, like death threats. I think it is a dangerous trajectory when these multinational companies start deciding what governing bodies and people should think. It brings into question people's actual rights to speech. People should have the right to voice their opinion on subjects like this. If people are prevented from speaking out as much on social media, they will get driven to more niche websites and forums to discuss things, which in turn help create more echo chambers. The great thing about free speech is the ability to bounce ideas off with other people and be given the opportunity to decide for myself what is right with more information available. Taking this away will make it harder to really test ideas and make them more refined. This is more my criticism of social media in general, but the talk on the virus and the vaccines has noticeably made it worse for any side to reconcile.
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  2022-04-14

  Biolabs

  This is an Instagram post by dehart_perks. This is a parody of the "I Stand with Ukraine" social media trend that became popular with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It is making fun of people that follow the media narrative, whether it is for which side to support in a war, or getting vaccinated. The extra things that are added, are biolabs, which some believe are responsible for helping create COVID itself.
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  2022-04-15

  I Stand With Pfizer

  This is an Instagram post by covid_parent. This is a parody of "I Stand with Ukraine" posts that have become popular over social media since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Instead of saying that they stand with Ukraine, it is saying they stand with Pfizer, a pharmaceutical company. It is mocking the type of people that just follow any trend, whether it is vaccines, or which side to support in a war. The hashtags call the pandemic a "scamdemic" and references the "New World Order." These tags indicate the overall feeling that the pandemic is partly, or completely planned, in order to exert more control over people and limit their freedoms.
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  2020-04-30

  "The Coronavirus Conspiracy Boom" - The Atlantic Monthly

  The advent of the COVID-19 pandemic and its associated socioeconomic and political shock has created fertile grounds for the dissemination of conspiracy theories. In an article for the Atlantic Monthly, political scientists Joseph E. Uscinski and Adam M. Enders provide an overview of why conspiracy theories have developed and spread, and how they are being exacerbated by political polarization, groupthink, group identity, and misinformation. The authors also examine the different types of COVID-19 conspiracy theories, showing that certain kinds of conspiracy theories are associated with political identities and exacerbated by conspiratorial statements made by politicians.
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  2020-05-09

  "If Someone Shares the ‘Plandemic’ Video, How Should You Respond?" - The Atlantic Monthly

  The COVID-19 pandemic and its associated economic shock have created fertile conditions for the development and spread of conspiracy theories, especially about the nature of the pandemic. These conspiracy theories have begun to permeate the lives of many Americans, disrupting personal relationships through arguments and disgust. In an article for the Atlantic Monthly, journalist Joe Pinsker provides readers with advice on what to do if someone in their personal circle shares conspiracy theory videos, particularly the Plandemic documentary. Rather than be combative and insulting, Pinsker advises his readers to be emphatic and understanding. This allows readers to pivot the conversation toward addressing the conspiracy theorist's concerns, while also not causing them to be more entrenched in their positions. When these tactics do not work, however, Pinsker advises readers to give on them as a lost cause.
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  2020-10-06

  Fear, Fiction, and Facebook

  (HIST30060) Content warning: suicide mention. As the pandemic has developed over the course of the year and Victoria has progressed through lockdowns, a Facebook friend of mine from high school has taken to discussing COVID-19 extensively. She posts very regularly (on average between 20 and 30 times per day) with commentary on the pandemic, ranging from sanctimonious to outraged, sharing posts from conspiracy groups, pandemic-denying politicians, and other Facebook users that downplay the existence or severity of the virus. The series of unsubstantiated claims and recurrent mentions of ‘breaking news’ from various unnamed rogue health workers results in some of her Facebook friends querying her content and questioning the validity of her sources. When they reply to her posts, her Facebook friends often attempt to share news articles and updates from verified, fact-checked sources, but when this happens she talks past them, avoids the question, engages in a range of logical fallacies, or outright denies the validity of the information with which she’s been presented. In particular, she received significant backlash from her friends when she shared a post about the Australian suicide rate in 2020, crediting an alleged (untrue) increase directly to the lockdowns: one friend responded to say ‘I’m swiftly losing respect for you and the misinformation you keep posting.’ Earlier in the year, her posts gained greater traction among her Facebook friends: people would react to them, comment with information, speculation, or gentle disagreement; by now (November), the engagement her posts receive has dwindled down to the occasional like, but usually nothing more than that. Seeing her posts when I checked Facebook began to remind me of a conversation I’d had with my housemate about the role of fear and a desire for control behind belief in conspiracy theories; namely that these belief systems might bring warped comfort on some level. In situations that are scary, believing in some nameless, faceless ‘them’, or connecting with other people who claim to have secret insider information hidden from the general public, might help ease a feeling of powerlessness by believing someone is in control. I would allege her Facebook posts stem at least in part from fear, which I feel is more than understandable given an underlying experience for many people this year has been a deep, semi-constant sense of paralytic uncertainty. While I empathise with this, and genuinely feel compassion towards her for what she’s going through, I can’t help but think the way she has responded to these feelings is irresponsible at best, and dangerous at worst. I find her advocacy of the importance of independent research and critical thinking approaches irony, as the ‘research’ she describes appears to consist of discussing factually incorrect information with other scared people who are also searching for stability and predictability. I don’t begrudge her the fear she feels in any capacity, nor do I want to pass judgement on how others cope with this experience, but I can’t help feeling that this does more harm than good; I worry it proliferates false information, and further demoralises those who read it. While individual conjecture, ideas, philosophising, and critical thinking are absolutely necessary and a healthy degree of scepticism is vital when reading anything, I believe there is a degree of responsibility one assumes to check, even cursorily, that the content they’re sharing has some basis in fact, especially in instances like this where people are quite literally dying. While the experience of the pandemic is undoubtedly having a severe effect on her, I feel irritated reading her advocacy of things that will objectively place other people at risk of illness. It seems to me insensitive to spread deliberately divisive misinformation, given there are people who are assume risk every day when they go to work (even in a country that has implemented measures to control the spread of the disease, when many countries overseas have not). I worry about the broader social repercussions of the division and polarisation that misinformation contributes to, both in the case of COVID-19 and in other contexts. When I look over the things she’s been posting on Facebook, I feel overwhelming pity and compassion for what she is going through individually, and what everyone in Victoria is undergoing as a collective. I understand that everyone is coping with an extremely stressful and emotionally taxing experience and is attempting to manage as well as they can. I’ve seen parallels drawn between the COVID-19 pandemic and previous pandemic disease outbreaks and major historical events in general, and the comfort people derive from a sense of shared experience during difficulty. I think in part the pandemic has cemented in my mind the confronting fact that being alive is just living through a series of major historical events; that history is not something that has happened to other people, in other places, at other times, but is happening now and will continue to happen, over and over. While this is incredibly confronting to think about and dredges up an overwhelming feeling of powerlessness at times, it seems to me by looking at both the past and the present that people working to mutually support each other make upheaval, fear, and uncertainty much easier to bear.
• 
  2020-10-22

  Epoch Times found in Mailbox

  The front page literally only covers China and Covid-19 conspiracies. The Falun Gong own and run the Neo-Conservative paper. This and the Shen Yun dance trope appears to be apart of the continuous push to reach non-chinese North Americans.
• 
  2020-10-20

  Health officials warn Canadians against believing COVID-19 'internment camps' disinformation

  Conspiracy theorists in Canada believe that the Federal government is planning on creating internment camps and forcing people into them. This is likely due to the government push for funding of federal quarantine sites offered to homeless and other individuals on a voluntary basis.
• 
  2020-07-07

  Conspiracy Theories can be Deadly

  Conspiracy theories can be interesting, scary, and even entertaining. But they have real life consequences for some. This story about Carsyn Leigh Davis illustrates how dangerous conspiracy theories can be. Davis’s mother took her to a COVID-19 church party to purposely expose her to the virus. She was immunocompromised and became seriously ill. She was treated with treatments like hydroxychloriquine which have not been proven to be safe or effective by the FDA. She ultimately died from the disease. Here’s an example of folks who buy into conspiracy theories like Plandemic and Q-Anon and how their lack of information literacy has real consequences on their own health and the health of others.
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  2020-09-14

  Les Canadiens moins complotistes que d'autres, selon une étude de l'Université de Sherbrooke

  Translation of Title: Canadians are less likely to believe in conspiracy theories according to a study by Université de Sherbrooke. Translation of poster: The WHO lies to us outright Translation of Graph: Adherence Rate to conspiracy theories by country (In order from least to greatest) Belgium, Canada, New Zealand, Switzerland, United States, England, Philippines.
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  2020-06-15

  Conspiracy Theory Involving Captain America and Spaghetti

  Since COVID-19 was an unprecedented event, people tried hard to understand its cause. Many conspiracy theories cropped up. This one claimed that the virus was predicted by the movie Captain America. Here he is shown in Times Square, New York, with a bottle of Corona beer in lights and what could be seen as an atom of the virus. These two elements "prove" that the virus was released into the population. Of course, the virus has nothing whatsoever to do with the beer--it was named corona due to the halo surrounding each virion.
• 
  2020-05-08

  Not My New Normal

  This skeptic believes COVID-19 is a conspiracy to allow testing, tracking, poisoning, and chipping. This person refuses to also wear a mask, believing masks to be part of the conspiracy. The person who shared this post on http://reddit.com/r/insanepeoplefacebook sarcastically states amount of people already dead to refute the conspiracy claim.