When Murdoch’s Fox News agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems the best part of one billion dollars to settle its defamation case, it effectively admitted to lying in support one of the wilder (yet more widely believed) conspiracy theories in our current era of wild (yet widely believed) conspiracy theories. Namely, that the 2020 election was a fix, and Trump really won.
For around four or five minutes after hearing the news, it struck me that this had finally been debunked.
But of course, it had not.
A lack of meaningful proof had not stopped people believing it in the first place, so why should a defamation case?
I am slightly addicted to news outlets I disagree with and skim across them in moments of downtime. Partly I think this is healthy – it stops me falling in to a rut of confirmation and cuddly bubbles, and sometimes I learn something that changes my mind. Partly I think this is smug – every bit of madness or bias on these channels assuring me that these people are deranged and I am correct in all things.
I skimmed some sites, which, perhaps predictably, mostly ignored the Dominion news. Then I turned to Facebook.
I have a couple of acquaintances who regularly share unlikely theories. Both firmly believed 2020 was fixed and seven million votes were faked. Both ignored the inconvenience of the Dominion case to push other favourites: the whole 6th January White House riot was staged by actors, and America secretly made Russia invade Ukraine. One has previously said Covid was a CIA hoax, and asked: “has anyone actually seen any of the bodies?”
Both have good jobs and tertiary education. And both are women.
My definition of a conspiracy theory is not just “things I disagree with,” but rather, a knee-jerk response to an event that immediately points to some explanation with zero or limited proof, when other explanations are much more likely (or have even been reasonably proven). “Trump should have won,” is opinion. “The election was fixed” is a conspiracy theory.
The perfect conspiracy theory has enough detail to grab attention, enough implausibility to make the sharer feel special, but enough vagueness to be untestable. And that un-testability is key – that’s why they’re conspiracy theories and not conspiracy hypotheses. If I were to tell you that my aunt had the power of levitation, it would be very hard for you to prove, definitively, that she did not.
In popular culture, conspiracy theorists are men in dark basements, lurking on chat-boards in the darker corners of the internet, possibly wearing tinfoil hats. But recent research suggests that more women are believers, and what they believe tends to differ from the male favourites…
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