The current situation in the world has seen a huge rise in conspiracy theories and negationism, let's take a look at how they work and how the Internet influenced the views of so many people.

Hello everyone, long time no see.

The current world situation is... particular... and one thing we all have seen and experienced closely is the rise in popularity of conspiracy theories. In this small piece we'll take a look at the logical fallacies usually involved in conspiracy theories, how the age of digital communication and the Internet have exacerbated the issue and just learn to think better.

Here we go!

Conspiracy theories are interesting!

This is not a formal fallacy, but it can be tied to one of our minds' mechanisms. First of all, conspiracy theories makes us think we live in a way more interesting world: like a movie where there are evil people who put people's lives in danger for personal gain.

Boredom is a hard thing to deal with, and we'd do almost anything to spruce up our lives, and conspiracy theories tie into that.

Even more, conspiracy theories tend to behave like smokescreens, they leave a lot of "blank space" for our minds to reach their conclusion and they don't have a really sound, repeatable way of proving themselves.

This is where the Internet comes in: we receive a lot of information in a very short time, and many times we don't read everything and just pass it on.

Conspiracy Theories play into our cognitive biases

Every person has some cognitive biases, that's how we just are.

One of our biggest cognitive biases is the "proportionality bias", which can be summarized with the following phrase:

Big events must have big causes.

This is usually not true, accidents happen with the same probability to normal people as they happen to VIPs or government officials. Most of the time, an accident is just what it is: an accident.

The Bandwagon Fallacy

The age of the Internet brought us a lot of nice things: fast communication, information and in the last 10 years we got "social networks".

Communities of similar-minded individuals can be victim of the "bandwagon fallacy", which we can express as:

Many people believe it, so it must be true.

The higher the number of people that believe something is, the more truthful such thing seems. If we all suddenly started believing we could defy gravity, gravity would still exist and keep our feet on the ground.

Conspiracy Theories are self-sealing

This is a fallacy can be expressed with the following phrase:

If you are not against the conspiracy, then you are part of the conspiracy

This is what is called a "false dilemma" (sometimes called "false dichotomy" or "black or white fallacy"): the conspiracy theory puts everything in two distinct and mutually exclusive categories: either you're with us, or against us.

Having tight-knit communities that reinforce the "us versus them" on the Internet, reinforced by the bandwagon fallacy expressed above just exhacerbates the issue.

Conspiracy theories can say anything

Anything the conspiracy theories say take in account that the conspiracy actually exists.

This is called a "ex falso quod libet": given a false premise any conclusion is true (this is a fundamental property of Material Implications in logic), sometimes this is also called "Principle of explosion".

Conspiracy theories start assuming the conspiracy exists, to be able to build their own argument.

Conspiracy theories look for spurious relationships

Conspiracy theories tend to confuse "correlation" and "causation", by giving an "interesting causation" from some "correlations".

Most of the time, there is a "missing element" that connects the dots and gives us a better view of things.

Let's take a famous example: "5G towers cause coronavirus" ( they do not! )

Some people may bring you maps comparing the coronavirus spread and the 5G towers rollout and they would look really similar, thus reaching the conclusion above.

If we check a third map with the population density, we will find that it looks really similar to the first two maps. How so?

Simple: 5G rolls out in more densily populated areas, to serve more people and lower costs. Also viruses spread faster in denser areas.

With new technologies and statistic systems given to us by the digital age, now we can find relationships faster and more easily, just see the page dedicated to them at tylervigen.com and build one yourself!

Conspiracy theories appeal to "experts"

Many times you will see an "expert" filling you with information. This is not how science works, in science there is no "principle of authority", I even wrote a post about it: On the principle of authority, myths and IT .

With the newer technologies it is really easy to create some production that looks official and create well-made products that give the producers more credibility. Such "faked credibility" can also boost "fake experts".

Conspiracy theories mix and match a lot of informal fallacies

Shifting the burden of proof, appeal to emotion, circular reasoning, begging the question, strawman arguments, tu quoque (also known as "appeal to hypocrisy" and its variant "whataboutism")...

Conspiracy theories make use of so many of these that I cannot possibly list them all.

Conspiracy theories leverage on your lack of knowledge

As intelligent and educated as we can be, we do not know everything. I am a decent software developer, but I know nothing of how a plane is built, or how a surgery is performed.

Education protects you from conspiracy theories, because if something doesn't make sense, it will ring all the bells in your head. Let's take an example that happened to me personally.

I saw a conspiracy video on 5G (go figure!) shared by an acquaintance: this video links 3G connectivity and heart cancer, and shows (I'm quoting from memory and translating):

a test chamber where rats were put at 1 meter of distance around an antenna emitting at 1.8 GHz of power.

Did you see the error?

1.8GHz is not a measure of power, it's a frequency. This is like saying "I'm going to hit you 1.8 billion times a second" without stating if I would hit you with a punch (thus probably atomizing you) or a slightly delicate puff of air (thus thoroughly annoying you).

The video expressed no real mention of power, if the antenna emitted 1MW (Watt is the measure of power in this case) at 1 meter cancer would probably develop in rats, but also it would defeat the purpose of the video, since 3G mobile phones emit a lot lower power than that (calculating SAR values is complicated and differs between US and Europe, so I will not delve into it).

Also 3G and 5G are completely different technologies: 3G uses big towers to cover large areas with high power, while 5G uses lots of smaller antennas that emit a lot less power (I am massively oversimplifying here).

Some would complain about the fact that 5G uses new frequencies: this is not true, it merely uses frequencies that were once dedicated to digital TV, it's the same as enlarging a road by repurposing the sidewalk.

This video was shared on Facebook, which brings us to another problem: the sheer amount of content cannot be all filtered, some will inevitably slip through.

How can we protect ourselves?

This is the digital age, where masses of content reach us and we dedicate every one of them less and less time. When some theory (or news!) reaches us, let's ask ourselves some questions:

• Does it come from a reputable source?
• Is this trying to elicit an emotional response from me?
• Is it proven? (You want a "meta-analysis" on the matter, not just a single study)
• Is there a more realistic reason for what is stated?
• Do I know enough about the matter to be able to judge its truthfulness?

With some time and dedication, it will become less and less difficult to distinguish what is "likely true" to what is "probably a conspiracy theory", and learn to stop people we don't even know from playing with our minds.

In this case, technology can come to our help, since social networks are starting to flag damaging content such as some conspiracy theories that may have ramifications (either political or in public health).

Conclusions

There are lots of other questions that we can ask ourselves and we cannot ask and answer them all.

This post is also very loosely tied to technology, this being a technology-first blog. This is just a stream of consciousness in the hopes to incite some thoughts to people, also given by some personal experiences and events.

Digital Technology has been with us for a while and made our lives a lot easier, made us know a lot of new people, but it is also a double-edged sword and should be treated with care, as any other media.

Conspiracy theories have ridden the wave of the Internet and spread far and wide, reaching more and more people who look for a response for unprecedented events, a scapegoat, a "bubble" where to live in, with their thoughts unchallenged or maybe just a way out of their daily boredom and ended up going too far.

Thank you for reading.