36 ms·

Ex-Googler Turned Whistleblower and QAnon Fan Made 'Plandemic' Go Viral

30 points by elsewhen 6y ago

fossuser 6y ago
I find this kind of thing scary because it seems like it’s so easy to go down a rabbit hole and begin to believe crazy things that break your ability to reason. Lots of people already believe crazy things, how easy is it to get trapped by conspiracy nonsense? Does exposure take an otherwise rational person and infect them with delusions? Does it require some underlying predisposition? Is there a good way to defend yourself? It freaks me out in part because I suspect we’re all more vulnerable to it than we think we are. I think possibly even more than average because we’re more willing to question what we believe to be true, I just hope my tools of reasoning about what’s true continue to work.
- blisterpeanuts 6y ago
  The solution is good education. Teach children critical reading skills, i.e. question what you read, conduct a debate in your head rather than simply accepting it because it's the printed word. Unfortunately, in the U.S. at least, children are not being taught to think critically. They barely have read a single book by the end of high school, let alone the panoply of the great classics. I know this for a fact; I have a high schooler currently finishing 9th grade and it seems as if her history and literature teachers are more focused on social justice topics than the grand pageant of Western culture. Too bad.
  - lowdose 6y ago
    It is the same in Europe where fallacies are only taught to the class prepped to go to universities. Almost as if logical thinking is preserved to a special kind of people. Critical thinking what I learned in the first year of university like Carl Popper and such should have been given to every child after writing. If children do not understand it is on the teachers that they do not get the point. More investment is maybe necessary in visuals, animations to put life into stories that are otherwise to abstract for kids to grasp.
    - fossuser 6y ago
      It's not just the kids, a lot of the teachers are terrible at critical thinking too. I suspect it's actually a minority of the population that does it at all in any capacity.
      - lowdose 6y ago
        Exactly but for many people it is an unknown unknown in this case and for the minority of people that are aware of this choose for a significant amount of time to exclude 90% of the population in this matter.
  - mcphage 6y ago
    > are more focused on social justice topics than the grand pageant of Western culture What is the grand pageant of Western culture if not the rise of social justice for all?
  - aswanson 6y ago
    I don't think education is enough. If people want to believe crazy things, they will. Back when I was on fb, there was an older guy who had a college degree in the classics and was sharing crazy gateway pundit articles and demonic, proto pizzagate Hillary memes. If it affirms your priors, people will believe almost anything.
  - tootie 6y ago
    Read the headline. This guy worked at Google. He's not the only out there with a strong education and high IQ who has turned irrational.
    - cmurf 6y ago
      Maybe his education was strong but vertical, and thus inadequate, leaving him susceptible to irrationality? At my university, the arts and sciences school had broad requirements: math, chemistry or physics, a language, history, humanities, and also a critical thinking requirement that could be fullfilled by specific classes: philosophy, logic/heuristics, political science, etc. Intro classes never qualified for the critical thinking requirement. Most of my friends were in the engineering school and got none of this. They could took only engineering related classes, they had no history or language requirement possibly not even an offering. All of them hated the single "non-engineering" class they had to take: writing. That was apparently as critical thinking as it got.
  - aswanson 6y ago
    I've given up on humans in general being amenable to reason. If an obvious 2-bit incompetent conman can get 40 percent of the population to swear unwavering alliegance, the species has no chance. Dinosaurs lasted far longer, we're just too stupid as a collective.
- donclark 6y ago
  Will tricks like this will continue to get harder to contain due to deepfake imagery and videos with deepaudio fakery? Should our default be to question, research multiple angles and other trusted resources before reposting or sharing?
  - fossuser 6y ago
    I actually suspect the directly fake stuff to be less effective overall. The more effective manipulation is stuff that is partly or narrowly true, but taken out of context with a lot of surrounding narrative applied to it powered by motivated reasoning and intent to manipulate. A lot of connecting out of context 'dots', but ignoring key conflicting or contrary details that don't align with the narrative. Basically fueled by confirmation bias and motivated reasoning, but weaponized to persuade.
    - donclark 6y ago
      Directly fake? Wouldnt using someones image, video, and/or voice make the fakery partly true? I know a lot of the deep fake videos have fooled my mother (older people) that are unaware of these types of capability. And they will get harder to spot no?
      - fossuser 6y ago
        My intuition would be that while people may be fooled initially, with that kind of thing it's easier to show that it's manipulated and then people take it less seriously. If you show someone an image you claim to be true and it turns out to be faked via Photoshop, most people don't keep believing it's true. I think the more insidious misinformation is harder to disprove as easily and as directly.
- Apocryphon 6y ago
  My take is that the proliferation of conspiracy theories in the U.S. is both a natural consequence of the Information Age ("They stuff you with so much useless information, you feel full" - Ray Bradbury) and the polarization of the U.S. society. Consensus reality broke with Bush v. Gore. Growing up on the internet with the backdrop of the War on Terror/in Iraq, I saw how online discourse was basically heated partisans, each armed with their reams of links, sources, and talking head proxies, spamming each other with evidence that the other side would refuse to acknowledge. Each appealing to their own authority in their own respective reality- never the twain shall meet. I don't know if there can be a bridging this gap until this society can create authorities that will be recognized by both sides. Institutions that a majority of people will defer to. The media is being attacked by all sides. Public religion has been on the wane, and the U.S. has a multitude of sects anyway. Appeals to "science"? Good luck with that, science has been politicized with decades, and issues like the reproducibility crisis doesn't help. In the meantime, everyone just continues to be trapped in their own filter bubbles, nudged along by oh-so-helpful recommendation algorithms, bunkering down into their online communities of the like-minded, and modern myths and urban legends will continue to spread alongside alienation and mistrust.
- tootie 6y ago
  I think we seriously need some research on this because it's become absolute mass delusion. People can make mistakes and people can be misinformed, but the crusaders for this kind of nonsense are just on another level. There's an entire generation that just abandoned their senses and descended into near solipsism where anything with evidence is automatically not real.
tptacek 6y ago
If you're unfamiliar with the batshit Plandemic video, the debunking at Science is probably the best starting point: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/05/fact-checking-judy-mikovits-controversial-virologist-attacking-anthony-fauci-viral https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/05/fact-checking-judy-m... The thing about Plandemic is, as big a deal as it was on Facebook, the backlash started almost immediately; in fact, the virality had probably as much to do with people dunking on it (and on anyone who seemed to be propagating it) than on any kind of adoption of its message. There are no doubt low-information people who believe the video, but my guess is that they'd believe some other random nonsense had this video not been released.
- FriendlyNormie 6y ago
  Shut up, windbag. You’ve spoken enough on this site for multiple lifetimes. You and DoreenMichelle should set yourselves on fire as soon as possible.
- DonHopkins 6y ago
  Anybody who FriendlyNormie ([dead] sibling post) wants to set himself on fire as soon as possible is A-OK in my book. You have the most pathetic haters -- I'm envious. Please keep on posting great stuff, as you always do! ;)
- stillbourne 6y ago
  > There are no doubt low-information people who believe the video, but my guess is that they'd believe some other random nonsense had this video not been released. In a world where people think that Hillary Clinton and high society democrats satanically ritually abuse and eat children in the basement of a pizzeria, I think perhaps the level of nonsense people are capable of believing may exceed expectations.
  - tptacek 6y ago
    Really, that's my point: if it wasn't Plandemic, it would be PlanzzaGate.
fzeroracer 6y ago
This readily illustrates the problem with trying to fight a lie on equal grounds. Once the lie has gone viral it's no longer an even fight; you're now trying to convince a large portion of the world that what they read was wrong. Even worse the fact that the lie is now popular further shields it, because it becomes an argument of 'how could it be wrong when so many people have seen it' and 'no one would spread a lie like this'. You're no longer fighting a battle of fact vs fiction, you're fighting a battle of ideology which is much harder to win. This can become seriously dangerous by preemptively trying to get people to avoid vaccination or by not taking basic measures to prevent disease spread such as wearing a mask.
- tzs 6y ago
  Also, even if you do successfully fight it, in the time it took you to make your case the makers of the lie have had time to make and spread two or more other lies because making lies is less work than refuting lies.
kens 6y ago
Back in 2009, I used Paul Graham's Arc language to do some simple genome analysis of XMRV [1], the virus (wrongly) claimed to cause chronic fatigue syndrome. That virus was discovered by Mikovits, the star of this video. It's kind of bizarre for her to reappear a decade later in a conspiracy video. [1] http://www.righto.com/2009/11/simple-genome-analysis-with-arc-in.html http://www.righto.com/2009/11/simple-genome-analysis-with-ar...
henriquez 6y ago
I had not heard of this Plandemic film before reading this article, but now I'm going to look it up. I enjoy viewing anything labeled with the "debunked conspiracy theory" trope at this point. As far as I can tell the lede here is "let's dox some random YouTuber." Not super classy.
- rconti 6y ago
  On the flip side, you could view it as giving publicity to people with ideas that weren't worth spreading in the first place. After all, you hadn't heard of it before this article was posted here; I'm sure it'll be new to many others as well, so actually the publicity will help them. An alternative would be not covering it at all. As it turns out, not every item in the marketplace of ideas has the same value.
  - blisterpeanuts 6y ago
    I had heard of it before this article was posted, but hadn't seen it, and probably never would have seen it but for this negative publicity. Of course, Youtube took it down, but it's available on Bitchute[1]. It looks like nonsense to me, conspiracy theories and exaggerations, but preventing people from deciding for themselves is censorship, i.e. the suppression of free speech, and that never ends well. 1. https://www.bitchute.com/video/MXyKqZ201Dj5/ https://www.bitchute.com/video/MXyKqZ201Dj5/
    - mcphage 6y ago
      > preventing people from deciding for themselves is censorship YouTube isn't telling anybody they can't watch it, they just don't want their name associated with it, or pay for the hardware to serve it out.
      - blisterpeanuts 6y ago
        Over 500 hours of videos are uploaded to Youtube every minute. You think they actually care about the cost of hardware to host a 2-hour political documentary? As far as censorship goes, taking down a video for political reasons is pretty much textbook censorship, regardless how you may spin it or justify it.

30 points by elsewhen 6y ago

I find this kind of thing scary because it seems like it’s so easy to go down a rabbit hole and begin to believe crazy things that break your ability to reason. Lots of people already believe crazy things, how easy is it to get trapped by conspiracy nonsense? Does exposure take an otherwise rational person and infect them with delusions? Does it require some underlying predisposition? Is there a good way to defend yourself? It freaks me out in part because I suspect we’re all more vulnerable to it than we think we are. I think possibly even more than average because we’re more willing to question what we believe to be true, I just hope my tools of reasoning about what’s true continue to work.

blisterpeanuts 6y ago
The solution is good education. Teach children critical reading skills, i.e. question what you read, conduct a debate in your head rather than simply accepting it because it's the printed word. Unfortunately, in the U.S. at least, children are not being taught to think critically. They barely have read a single book by the end of high school, let alone the panoply of the great classics. I know this for a fact; I have a high schooler currently finishing 9th grade and it seems as if her history and literature teachers are more focused on social justice topics than the grand pageant of Western culture. Too bad.
- lowdose 6y ago
  It is the same in Europe where fallacies are only taught to the class prepped to go to universities. Almost as if logical thinking is preserved to a special kind of people. Critical thinking what I learned in the first year of university like Carl Popper and such should have been given to every child after writing. If children do not understand it is on the teachers that they do not get the point. More investment is maybe necessary in visuals, animations to put life into stories that are otherwise to abstract for kids to grasp.
  - fossuser 6y ago
    It's not just the kids, a lot of the teachers are terrible at critical thinking too. I suspect it's actually a minority of the population that does it at all in any capacity.
    - lowdose 6y ago
      Exactly but for many people it is an unknown unknown in this case and for the minority of people that are aware of this choose for a significant amount of time to exclude 90% of the population in this matter.
- mcphage 6y ago
  > are more focused on social justice topics than the grand pageant of Western culture What is the grand pageant of Western culture if not the rise of social justice for all?
- aswanson 6y ago
  I don't think education is enough. If people want to believe crazy things, they will. Back when I was on fb, there was an older guy who had a college degree in the classics and was sharing crazy gateway pundit articles and demonic, proto pizzagate Hillary memes. If it affirms your priors, people will believe almost anything.
- tootie 6y ago
  Read the headline. This guy worked at Google. He's not the only out there with a strong education and high IQ who has turned irrational.
  - cmurf 6y ago
    Maybe his education was strong but vertical, and thus inadequate, leaving him susceptible to irrationality? At my university, the arts and sciences school had broad requirements: math, chemistry or physics, a language, history, humanities, and also a critical thinking requirement that could be fullfilled by specific classes: philosophy, logic/heuristics, political science, etc. Intro classes never qualified for the critical thinking requirement. Most of my friends were in the engineering school and got none of this. They could took only engineering related classes, they had no history or language requirement possibly not even an offering. All of them hated the single "non-engineering" class they had to take: writing. That was apparently as critical thinking as it got.
- aswanson 6y ago
  I've given up on humans in general being amenable to reason. If an obvious 2-bit incompetent conman can get 40 percent of the population to swear unwavering alliegance, the species has no chance. Dinosaurs lasted far longer, we're just too stupid as a collective.
donclark 6y ago
Will tricks like this will continue to get harder to contain due to deepfake imagery and videos with deepaudio fakery? Should our default be to question, research multiple angles and other trusted resources before reposting or sharing?
- fossuser 6y ago
  I actually suspect the directly fake stuff to be less effective overall. The more effective manipulation is stuff that is partly or narrowly true, but taken out of context with a lot of surrounding narrative applied to it powered by motivated reasoning and intent to manipulate. A lot of connecting out of context 'dots', but ignoring key conflicting or contrary details that don't align with the narrative. Basically fueled by confirmation bias and motivated reasoning, but weaponized to persuade.
  - donclark 6y ago
    Directly fake? Wouldnt using someones image, video, and/or voice make the fakery partly true? I know a lot of the deep fake videos have fooled my mother (older people) that are unaware of these types of capability. And they will get harder to spot no?
    - fossuser 6y ago
      My intuition would be that while people may be fooled initially, with that kind of thing it's easier to show that it's manipulated and then people take it less seriously. If you show someone an image you claim to be true and it turns out to be faked via Photoshop, most people don't keep believing it's true. I think the more insidious misinformation is harder to disprove as easily and as directly.
Apocryphon 6y ago
My take is that the proliferation of conspiracy theories in the U.S. is both a natural consequence of the Information Age ("They stuff you with so much useless information, you feel full" - Ray Bradbury) and the polarization of the U.S. society. Consensus reality broke with Bush v. Gore. Growing up on the internet with the backdrop of the War on Terror/in Iraq, I saw how online discourse was basically heated partisans, each armed with their reams of links, sources, and talking head proxies, spamming each other with evidence that the other side would refuse to acknowledge. Each appealing to their own authority in their own respective reality- never the twain shall meet. I don't know if there can be a bridging this gap until this society can create authorities that will be recognized by both sides. Institutions that a majority of people will defer to. The media is being attacked by all sides. Public religion has been on the wane, and the U.S. has a multitude of sects anyway. Appeals to "science"? Good luck with that, science has been politicized with decades, and issues like the reproducibility crisis doesn't help. In the meantime, everyone just continues to be trapped in their own filter bubbles, nudged along by oh-so-helpful recommendation algorithms, bunkering down into their online communities of the like-minded, and modern myths and urban legends will continue to spread alongside alienation and mistrust.
tootie 6y ago
I think we seriously need some research on this because it's become absolute mass delusion. People can make mistakes and people can be misinformed, but the crusaders for this kind of nonsense are just on another level. There's an entire generation that just abandoned their senses and descended into near solipsism where anything with evidence is automatically not real.

tptacek 6y ago

If you're unfamiliar with the batshit Plandemic video, the debunking at Science is probably the best starting point: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/05/fact-checking-judy-mikovits-controversial-virologist-attacking-anthony-fauci-viral https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/05/fact-checking-judy-m... The thing about Plandemic is, as big a deal as it was on Facebook, the backlash started almost immediately; in fact, the virality had probably as much to do with people dunking on it (and on anyone who seemed to be propagating it) than on any kind of adoption of its message. There are no doubt low-information people who believe the video, but my guess is that they'd believe some other random nonsense had this video not been released.

FriendlyNormie 6y ago
Shut up, windbag. You’ve spoken enough on this site for multiple lifetimes. You and DoreenMichelle should set yourselves on fire as soon as possible.
DonHopkins 6y ago
Anybody who FriendlyNormie ([dead] sibling post) wants to set himself on fire as soon as possible is A-OK in my book. You have the most pathetic haters -- I'm envious. Please keep on posting great stuff, as you always do! ;)
stillbourne 6y ago
> There are no doubt low-information people who believe the video, but my guess is that they'd believe some other random nonsense had this video not been released. In a world where people think that Hillary Clinton and high society democrats satanically ritually abuse and eat children in the basement of a pizzeria, I think perhaps the level of nonsense people are capable of believing may exceed expectations.
- tptacek 6y ago
  Really, that's my point: if it wasn't Plandemic, it would be PlanzzaGate.

fzeroracer 6y ago

This readily illustrates the problem with trying to fight a lie on equal grounds. Once the lie has gone viral it's no longer an even fight; you're now trying to convince a large portion of the world that what they read was wrong. Even worse the fact that the lie is now popular further shields it, because it becomes an argument of 'how could it be wrong when so many people have seen it' and 'no one would spread a lie like this'. You're no longer fighting a battle of fact vs fiction, you're fighting a battle of ideology which is much harder to win. This can become seriously dangerous by preemptively trying to get people to avoid vaccination or by not taking basic measures to prevent disease spread such as wearing a mask.

tzs 6y ago
Also, even if you do successfully fight it, in the time it took you to make your case the makers of the lie have had time to make and spread two or more other lies because making lies is less work than refuting lies.

kens 6y ago

Back in 2009, I used Paul Graham's Arc language to do some simple genome analysis of XMRV [1], the virus (wrongly) claimed to cause chronic fatigue syndrome. That virus was discovered by Mikovits, the star of this video. It's kind of bizarre for her to reappear a decade later in a conspiracy video. [1] http://www.righto.com/2009/11/simple-genome-analysis-with-arc-in.html http://www.righto.com/2009/11/simple-genome-analysis-with-ar...

henriquez 6y ago

I had not heard of this Plandemic film before reading this article, but now I'm going to look it up. I enjoy viewing anything labeled with the "debunked conspiracy theory" trope at this point. As far as I can tell the lede here is "let's dox some random YouTuber." Not super classy.

rconti 6y ago
On the flip side, you could view it as giving publicity to people with ideas that weren't worth spreading in the first place. After all, you hadn't heard of it before this article was posted here; I'm sure it'll be new to many others as well, so actually the publicity will help them. An alternative would be not covering it at all. As it turns out, not every item in the marketplace of ideas has the same value.
- blisterpeanuts 6y ago
  I had heard of it before this article was posted, but hadn't seen it, and probably never would have seen it but for this negative publicity. Of course, Youtube took it down, but it's available on Bitchute[1]. It looks like nonsense to me, conspiracy theories and exaggerations, but preventing people from deciding for themselves is censorship, i.e. the suppression of free speech, and that never ends well. 1. https://www.bitchute.com/video/MXyKqZ201Dj5/ https://www.bitchute.com/video/MXyKqZ201Dj5/
  - mcphage 6y ago
    > preventing people from deciding for themselves is censorship YouTube isn't telling anybody they can't watch it, they just don't want their name associated with it, or pay for the hardware to serve it out.
    - blisterpeanuts 6y ago
      Over 500 hours of videos are uploaded to Youtube every minute. You think they actually care about the cost of hardware to host a 2-hour political documentary? As far as censorship goes, taking down a video for political reasons is pretty much textbook censorship, regardless how you may spin it or justify it.