Review: On misinformation and conspiracies. James Ball’s ‘The Other Pandemic’
We need to start treating misinformation as a public health crisis argues James Ball in his new book.
The Literary Review, July 2023
How QAnon Contaminated the World
Back in the mists of time, great idealism surrounded social media. There was a sense that global interconnection would shift us into a more egalitarian and democratic age. How time makes fools of us all.
If you are a woman or a person from an ethnic minority, someone with a public profile or anyone who holds a view contrary to the mainstream, chances are you’ve been viciously trolled online and little to no action was taken by either Big Tech or the police. Perhaps, like me, you have watched in dismay and bewilderment as wild conspiracy theories (about everything from political paedophile rings operating beneath a pizza parlour in Washington, DC, to Bill Gates engineering coronavirus) spread at speed across the world, infecting even seemingly sensible people and driving families and friends apart. Journalists who thought fact-checking would be enough to counter such theories have been proved woefully wrong. Fact-checking, it transpires, is like bringing a fly swatter to a gunfight. Clearly, new solutions are needed to combat online conspiracy theories that increasingly result in violence in the real world.
Into these fetid swamps wades the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and data expert James Ball with this meticulously researched book (Bloomsbury 304pp £20) , in which he charts the rise and rise of online conspiracy theories. The book is an exhaustive and at times exhausting read. Ball makes the case that we can no longer ignore conspiracy theorists. Social media has ensured that even the most ludicrous theories can find a global audience.
As Ball documents, QAnon is at the heart of these developments. It started out as a conspiracy theory on such message boards as 4chan and 8chan. The core QAnon theory first appeared in a series of posts made from an anonymous account called Q Clearance Patriot. These contained wild pronouncements about an elite global cabal who engaged in ritual child abuse. From here, it spread to the alt-right, Trump supporters and even the former president himself, spawning a movement. When Covid-19 hit, it found new life among anti-vaxxers. QAnon is, Ball writes, ‘our first digital pandemic – a threat to humanity that has evolved and gone global’. Misogyny racism and anti-Semitism are at the heart of QAnon. Ball traces the obsession among QAnon followers with ritual child abuse back to the original ‘blood libel’, a centuries-old myth that Jews engage in ritual child abuse and murder.
It was 4channers who wrote the playbook for digital information warfare, Ball contends – not for any political purpose, initially, but ‘just as a way to pass the time’. This was pranking for shits and giggles. But around 2009 things took a darker turn. Part of the reason for this, Ball explains, is survivorship bias. While most males mature and grow tired of such pranks, some do not. Forums like 4chan become gathering places for the most immature and extreme. Many of the men who populate these boards have a deep sense of insecurity and powerlessness, and are searching for meaning and purpose. Hence the appeal of QAnon, which, Ball writes, ‘turns global politics into a game with you as its hero’. To some grown-ups, the childish belief in the existence of an all-powerful global elite is ‘oddly more reassuring than the idea that everything is just random, and everyone is fumbling their way through life’. Ball says QAnon isn’t political, but there is one thing you can count on: there will never be a feminist mutation of it. Misogyny is baked in. Given that QAnon originated among insecure and alienated men, surely we need to know more about the dark side of male psychology. Ball, however, never properly engages with the issue of toxic masculinity.
QAnon is unusual among movements in that it has no leader. Nor is there a coherent ideology. For a campaigner or activist, not having a clear goal is normally a flaw, but for QAnon it has proved a boon. People pick and choose whichever of the conspiracy theories associated with QAnon suits them, be it to do with 5G, vaccinations or the deep state. To help explain QAnon’s evolution, Ball invokes Richard Dawkins’s notion of the ‘selfish meme’. In his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, Dawkins argued that memes – songs, ideas, fashion, words – are the equivalent of genes when it comes to human culture. The ones that find the largest followings survive and reproduce themselves. Ball presents QAnon as a kind of meme, constantly adapting to find a wider audience.
I was surprised, and convinced, by Ball’s argument that the traditional responses to conspiracy theorists – ignoring and fact-checking – are useless in the fight against bad information. Instead, more radical solutions are required. ‘You need to cut it off from the things that sustain it,’ says Ball, ‘tackling the grounds where it breeds, the hate that feeds it, the incentives for politicians to play along, the online advertising model that can make feeding conspiracies lucrative.’ Algorithms are a big part of the problem. They are the most insidious tools of radicalisation because people don’t even realise they’re being radicalised by them. As they scroll, individuals are drawn surreptitiously into a bubble of increasingly extreme ideas.
Who is going to clear the swamp? We can’t expect companies to do this out of the goodness of their hearts. It will take strong state action. Ball advises governments to set up digital health programmes. Prevention is cheaper than cure, so we would be better off spending our resources tackling the roots of conspiracy theories before they take hold. ‘We try to destroy the spawning grounds of malarial mosquitoes, we improve the quality of drinking water … and we generally try to make our lived environments hostile to bacteria, viruses and other pathogens that are harmful to us. Our online environments are not similarly safe, and we take few steps to make them so,’ Ball states. ‘Until informed regulators require digital public health measures, companies will continue to pay lip service to such measures while taking as little action as is possible.’