Fueled by the internet, conspiracy theories are having a big moment in America. They're driving online chat room conversations, influencing our politics and adding to the polarization threatening to undermine our democracy.
  • Nobody@lemmy.worldEnglish
    69·
    10 months ago

    But habits are hard to break. After weeks of ignoring her feed, Ramona logged back on to Facebook. She missed the sense of community she had found in QAnon forums — the people, not the beliefs — and wanted to reconnect… But the Facebook group was gone, purged by Facebook

    Deplatforming works. It’s true they’ll go somewhere else, but they’ll lose lots of people every time.

  • some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org
    9·
    10 months ago

    The QAnon Anonymous podcast studies conspiratorial thinking. Very solid reporting, very entertaining if you have a sense to rubberneck the disaster of conspiracy theories.

    I’m glad she got out. Hope more people can and do.

  • partial_accumen@lemmy.world
    9·
    10 months ago

    Isolated from friends and family, distrustful of the explanations offered by officials and the media, Ramona and Don began to prepare. The military might try to put Americans like them in concentration camps run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA. They had to be ready to flee.

    I understand we’re getting specific examples to flesh out the story, but this is a failure of critical thinking skills.

    They are former fast food workers in western Tennessee that one now works at an auto assembly plant and the other is in a local college to become a school teacher.

    • Why would the government want to put them in a concentration camp?

    Lets assume for a moment there is a plausible “why” to continue the thought experiment. It doesn’t even pass back-of-the-napkin math.

    How could the government go about do this?

    If the bar for being rounded was up all college students and all automobile assembly workers, it would likely include hundreds of other jobs of the same level. There are just too many people to put in a camp! Who would build the camp? Wouldn’t we see the camps all over the country under construction? No? Would Western Tennessee be the FIRST camp to be built? Who are they going to get to run the camp? The entirety of people employed at FEMA is only 20,000 people That’s not even enough people to run camps in just Western Tennessee. Memphis alone has population of 655,569. Where are you gonna put all those folks? Who are their jailers?

    This claim of camps should have fallen apart with the smallest of scrutiny.

    I give credit to the woman who was deep into this that figured this out for herself eventually. She was also pretty young and just entering the adult world which itself is pretty scary irrespective of a never before seen global pandemic.

    • sealhaslupus@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      9 months ago

      conspiracy theories are perfect for certain types of people to latch on to because the narrative presented is malleable. If the theory is wrong it can be re-shaped into something new to explain the new unknown.

      if you scrutinised a conspiracy then yes they would generally fall flat, but if someone were the dispenser of that knowledge who imbued themselves with the self-importance of knowing secret details, they could always shift the goalposts and weave a new version of the story to maintain the reality they want to revel in.