Often, they seek to spread information that will divide the population and generate confusion. These campaigns do not try to change people’s opinions, but rather reaffirm them. They seek to reinforce their biased beliefs, increase controversy and confrontation between different views, whilst putting the truth and lies on the same level.
In doing so, they reaffirm their own beliefs, even when they are very distant to the truth. The truth does not matter. What they look to increase is resentment against those who hold different ideas.
Generating confusion, disapproval and disgust is effective in promoting biased agendas, as it creates a strong emotional response which can be deliberately manipulated to promote social disorder and justify authoritarian reactions to open and informed debate, which is crucial to the proper functioning of liberal democracies.
But these groups are inclined to conspiracy theories, many of them are extreme right-wing activists and they have no qualms about disqualifying scientific knowledge. They have their own scientists, their own journals, their own experts, and they manage to stop uncontested and marginal opinions becoming niche, by spreading them on social media and eventually they form part of mainstream media and the objective narrative, or even end up triggering violent or irrational reactions, or shaping the political agenda.
Conspiracy theories and the coronavirus
The widespread online conspiracy theory, which links the launch of the 5G data system to the spread of the coronavirus, is completely false but has led, for example, to several 5G broadcast towers being set on fire in the UK.
The fact that the Chinese city of Wuhan had recently deployed the 5G network has nothing to do with the fact that this was where the first outbreak of the new strain of coronavirus took place. Multiple theories have circulated on Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Youtube , or WhatsApp and Telegram groups about the origin of the virus: that it was created by Bill Gate in a Microsoft lab part of a globalized strategy to decimate the world’s population, that it was designed by the Chinese government as a biological weapon to undermine the US hegemony, that it was created by the CIA as part of a hybrid war between the US and China… all of these are fake.
Print
DemocraciaAbierta | Radio Free (2020-04-09T00:00:00+00:00) Fighting the virus of misinformation in times of pandemic. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2020/04/09/fighting-the-virus-of-misinformation-in-times-of-pandemic/
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