In the coming final three posts I want to turn to talk about how to handle or live with conspiracy theories in our churches and families. But before we turn toward the "What do we do?" posts I feel we need at least one post to talk directly about the rabbit hole itself.
By that I mean the Internet and social media. The conspiracy theory rabbit hole is YouTube, Facebook and message boards.
I expect most of you have watched the documentary The Social Dilemma. If you haven't take some time to watch it. I found it alarming.
A key part of the The Social Dilemma story is how a small change in the "recommend" algorithms of the Internet began to operate. In the early years the algorithms would track likes, clicks, and views. If you liked, viewed, or clicked on certain links the algorithms of social media would "recommend" more of that content to you. Social media chased "clicks."
But then YouTube made a fateful change. YouTube began tracking not clicks, but attention, how long you would watch certain content. Videos you watched longer would cause the algorithm to recommend other videos that would cause you to watch longer, to keep you on the screen. The goal was to keep you watching more and more content. Accidentally, or malevolently, this created perceptual funneling and tunneling. The algorithm, via "recommended" links, would push your attention toward certain content (funneling), and then deeper and deeper into that content (tunneling) as it was holding your attention longer and longer. This created digital rabbit holes.
Most rabbit holes are benign. We've all gone down a YouTube rabbit hole, following recommended link after recommended link to figure out how to fix, build, or make something. To solve some problem, answer some question, or to learn about something. We've followed links to watch a lot of content from someone we like or find interesting, from podcasters, to speakers, to entertainers.
But not all rabbit holes are so innocent. Most people who come to believe in a conspiracy theory do so by going down a digital rabbit hole, YouTube feeding you recommended link after recommended link taking your deeper and deeper. And before you know it, you're living in a completely different perceptual reality. What you think of as "real" or the "truth" slowly, imperceptibly, changes.
And this is a second way the Internet affects conspiracy theories. Specifically, the Internet has fractured and siloed our once shared vision of reality. We all now live in different perceptual worlds. We often call these "echo chambers," where people online talk only to other people who share their perceptual world, reinforcing and strengthening their particular view of reality. People now get their news from a prefered ideological outlet, like Fox or MSMBC. On Facebook and Twitter we mainly follow the likeminded, blocking or canceling those who we disagree with. We follow podcasters, YouTubers, and writers who share and confirm our worldviews.
As we all know, this has created a crisis for democracy. The voting public no longer agrees on basic reality. We don't agree about what is actual news versus fake news. We don't agree on what the facts are.
And while this risks being objected to as a false equivalence, both the right and the left are affected by cognitive biases that affect their view of "the facts." Yes, far too many evangelicals believe, to some degree, the Big Lie about the 2020 election being stolen from Trump. But we also saw progressives too quickly dismiss the Wuhan lab leak theory and persistently overestimate the risks of COVID in relation to other health and safety risks. Yes, given where I stand, the Big Lie is pretty damn big, but we all have our biases and selectively pick and choose among "the facts" to fit our preferred political narrative.
But let me return to the issue of conspiracy theories.
What I've been describing here isn't new. We all know what the Internet is doing to us, how it's polarizing and dividing us by fracturing our shared sense of "the truth." And this is, perhaps, the source of the biggest shock and grief when we discover that a loved one endorses the Big Lie or has gone down the QAnon rabbit hole. It is the recognition and dismay that we no longer live "in the same world" as our loved one. It is the sadness of feeling that we no longer understand this person whom we love, that an epistemic crack has opened between us that cannot be bridged, making us unintelligible to each other.
Suddenly, we find ourselves as strangers to our parents, children, loved ones and friends.
And in this, we experience a loss, a sort of death, and all the grief that entails. This is why the Big Lie and QAnon broke families and friendships.
