Suzanne Harrington: Beware the alternative facts of the cosmic right

"With oceans of information, however, comes tsunamis of stupid, because unlike monks with quills or publishing houses with slush piles, the internet is for everyone."

As if the pandemic hasn’t been tricky enough, it has been accompanied by what the WHO calls an ‘infodemic’ of misinformation. It has been, says the director of the International Fact Checking Network, “the biggest challenge fact checkers have ever faced”. 

A Reuters / Oxford University study examined the mountains of manipulated, fabricated, misleading, and false content, and concluded that, yes indeed, there has been a ton of twaddle peddled as fact.

“Science doesn’t know everything — otherwise it would stop,” says Dara O’Briain. “But just because science doesn’t know everything doesn’t mean you can fill in the gaps with whatever fairytale most appeals to you.”

And where do such fairytales come from? The University of Social Media, where beliefs are regurgitated as fact, gaining traction like snowballs rolling down hills of stupid. Is this what happens when we democratise the means of communication so that every single eejit with wifi has a valid voice?

Obviously the internet is the greatest invention since 1450 when a German bloke took an 11th-century Chinese invention — movable type — and gave humanity the printing press. Instead of cloistered monks doing life sentences of gold leaf, there were books. All the lovely, lovely books. And then nothing much until Tim Berners-Lee made the internet in 1991, leading to all the knowledge of the world flooding into our phones. Mindblowing and infinite.

With those oceans of information, however, comes tsunamis of stupid, because unlike monks with quills, or publishing houses with slush piles, the internet is for everyone. Do we want everyone to have a voice? From a democratic perspective, yes of course we do — but in this Orwellian post-truth era of ‘alternative facts’, selective digital laryngitis might be more useful.

From face masks depriving your brain of oxygen, to the whole anti-vaxxer thing, to the toxic individualism of your ‘human rights’ being abused because the pub is closed — entire movements of stupid have mushroomed since 2020. Health and wellbeing woo-wooists have aligned with conspiracy theorists to form the cosmic right, fired up by the likes of David Icke (who believes the world is run by shape-shifting lizard people) and Donald Trump (who encouraged Q Anon lunatics).

So far, so normal — there will always be stupid. What is new in this pandemic is how medical stupid has been energised, validated, and disseminated: alongside hundreds of actual experts, a handful of discredited medics have been given the same platform, their views validated as credible thanks to the giant democratic microphone of the internet.

With access to all the world’s information comes responsibility. Don’t waste precious time arguing with a conspiracy theorist — it’s like arguing with a ball of string. Instead, just fact check, fact check, fact check.