EDITORIAL: 5G fable morphs into towering conspiracy theory
It’s probably the strangest conspiracy theory to make the rounds recently — and Canada’s telecom giants wants it classed as terrorism.
Take your smart phone out of your pocket and have a look at it. Maybe the last thing you used it for was to message your spouse, who was on the way to the grocery store: “We need milk, too.” Maybe you used it to download a new chicken recipe, or to text an absent youngster, just so they can text back those two golden words, “Everything’s fine.”
Maybe you witnessed an automobile accident and used it to contact the fire department — maybe, flat on the floor and barely able to move, you used it to call an ambulance for yourself.
Technology can be a marvellous thing.
And, for a small segment of society, it’s apparently also terrifying.
For months now, cellphone providers have been dealing with an odd conspiracy theory about 5G cellphone service. The theory, passed around on social media sites, argues that the recent arrival of 5G service and the COVID-19 pandemic means that the two are connected. One part of the theory essentially suggests that 5G signals disrupt the human immune system, which caused the pandemic.
For months now, cellphone providers have been dealing with an odd conspiracy theory about 5G cellphone service.
The other, even odder part? That the COVID-19 virus can magically travel on 5G radio waves, so that the new cellphone signals actually transmit the disease.
It is, of course, beyond stupid. Sorry, but it is. COVID-19, like any other virus, is transmitted by contact.
Perhaps the best reason given for the spread of the conspiracy theory was given to ABC News in April by Dr. Eileen Culloty, a Dublin City University researcher who studies disinformation.
“For some people, the dramatic upheaval of COVID-19 demands an equally dramatic explanation,” she said. “That’s the core appeal of a conspiracy theory — it reduces complexity and coincidence into a simple narrative and points at someone or something to blame.”
The fact that it’s false didn’t stop a rash of 5G cell tower arsons across Britain earlier this year, and another group of them in Quebec in April and May.
And it meant that a group of cellphone providers in Canada went to the federal government, asking it to view the fires as a national security matter — which the federal government did.
What a huge waste of time, money and effort for everyone involved, based merely on social media fantasy that didn’t face the slightest bit of legitimate analysis before it was spread far and wide.
Right now, we’re surrounded by rafts of internet “truths” that are nothing of the kind. Often their logic and rigour are as weak as connecting two dots and yelling “proof!”
It’s not the quantity of information you can find on the internet — it’s the quality that matters.
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