{"id":251498,"date":"2021-05-17T11:24:17","date_gmt":"2021-05-17T08:24:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/how-conspiracy-theories-wreck-lives\/"},"modified":"2021-05-17T11:24:17","modified_gmt":"2021-05-17T08:24:17","slug":"how-conspiracy-theories-wreck-lives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/how-conspiracy-theories-wreck-lives\/","title":{"rendered":"#How conspiracy theories wreck lives"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#How conspiracy theories wreck lives<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

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Suddenly a loved one becomes a stranger. A dad, a mom or a friend lost to a parallel world made up of conspiracy theories and dangerous fantasies destroying couples and families.<\/p>\n

Some call conspiracy theories the evil of the century. Others say they are a reflection of a world starved of meaning. Either way, they are spreading fast on the internet, with very real consequences offline.<\/p>\n

A forum on the US website Reddit<\/a> offers a glimpse into conspiracy distress.<\/p>\n

QAnon Casualties, launched in 2019, counts more than 150,000 members whose loved ones believe in QAnon, an extremist movement claiming that former US president Donald Trump has been leading a secret war against Satan-worshipping paedophiles.<\/p>\n

The visibility of QAnon \u2014- which has never produced proof for its claims\u2014got a boost when some of the movement’s members were in the crowd that attacked the US Capitol in January.<\/p>\n

The Reddit forum’s members offer each other support for dealing with people close to them who subscribe to outlandish claims, with hostility towards COVID-19 vaccinations now high on the list of topics.<\/p>\n

‘Ripped apart’<\/b><\/p>\n

“My mother has gone full QAnon. I have baby-stepped around the issue, but it’s gotten out of hand,” said one user.<\/p>\n

“My family has been ripped apart by Q insanity,” posted another. “I can’t talk to my two younger brothers at all because they’re literally obsessed with Q and adjacent nonsense about vaccines, the election, etc..”<\/p>\n

The movement takes its name from “Q”, believed to be a former US senior official close to Trump who posted cryptic messages alluding to conspiracies on social media.<\/p>\n

People with conspiracy believers in their lives are often reluctant to come forward, feeling ashamed at an uncle who believes that the Earth is flat (a “flat-earther”), or a husband who threatens to disown his children if they wear facemasks to protect against COVID-19.<\/p>\n

A French retired teacher, who identified himself only as Yves, said he was stunned when an old friend posted “the pandemic is bogus” in a WhatsApp<\/a> group.<\/p>\n

Yves told AFP he’d known the man for 50 years “and we’ve often had lively debates, but never, never have our views of reality been this far apart”.
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Conspiracy theories usually spread when people feel that they are being lied to, said Marie Peltier, an author and expert in the field.<\/p>\n

She said the 9\/11 attacks in 2001 were instrumental for contemporary conspiracy theories, amplified by social media, while more recently COVID-19 had become a focal point.<\/p>\n

‘Heroes and villains’<\/b><\/p>\n

“Conspiracy theories offer an explanatory software that designates the heroes and the villains,” she said. “That’s a big part of their success.”<\/p>\n

French bookseller Paul\u2014not his real name\u2014still finds it hard to come to terms with how his mother, fearful of a second coronavirus lockdown, left her home late last summer to join a man who had bought an entire village in Bulgaria to house a community of French people wishing to escape restrictions at home.<\/p>\n

“My mother has become completely inaccessible. She has gone through the looking glass to the other side,” the 48-year old told AFP.<\/p>\n

Even before her departure, she lived like a recluse and “spent an incredible amount of time online, looking for answers to her rage against the injustices of the world”, Paul said.<\/p>\n

From backing the far left in the 1970s, including terror attacks committed by the Red Brigades group, Paul’s mother moved to the far right\u2014”with Putin as a screensaver on her PC”\u2014and joined a group denouncing alleged Zionist plots.<\/p>\n

“The lockdown was the last straw and COVID confirmed all her theories about the end of the world,” he said.<\/p>\n

Not many return<\/b><\/p>\n

Pascale Duval, spokesperson for French anti-cult association Unadfi, said believers in conspiracy theories typically go through a trip<\/a>le break from society.<\/p>\n

“First, a person will completely modify their values and their identity to mark their loyalty to a community. Then they will cut themselves off from their core environment making dialogue impossible, and finally they break with society,” she said.<\/p>\n

Duval said that behind every cult movement there is a “political project, or at least a societal one”, saying extreme forms of New Age beliefs found in some personal development, yoga or vegan circles could serve as gateways into conspiracy theories.<\/p>\n

QAnon’s approach is marked by “the hyper-aggressive way these beliefs are shared, and the disconnection that happens when the loved one doesn’t want to go down the Q rabbit hole,” said Mike Rothschild, a writer whose book “The Storm is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of Everything” is to be published next month.<\/p>\n

Sometimes people make their way back into the world they left behind, maybe after suddenly noticing that something in their newfound theories doesn’t quite gel, said Rothschild.<\/p>\n

“That opens the door for further questioning, which usually is the start of a long and painful process of realising how wrong they were,” he said. “But it’s rare so far.”\n <\/p>\n\n

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YouTube toughens rules for QAnon conspiracy content\n <\/p><\/div>\n

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\n \u00a9 2021 AFP<\/p>\n

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Citation<\/strong>:
\n ‘Through the looking glass’: How conspiracy theories wreck lives (2021, May 17)
\n retrieved 17 May 2021
\n from https:\/\/techxplore.com\/news<\/a>\/2021-05-glass-conspiracy-theories.html<\/p>\n

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