Is it ethical to laugh at proponents of conspiracy theories?
QAnon is an online conspiracy theory based on the premise that Donald Trump is trying to save the world from a cabal of powerful, blood-imbibing paedophiles. Since its first appearance in 2017, QAnon has ruined relationships and fuelledviolence.
Oh, and it’s generated plenty of memes.
There’s the meme where Ralph Wiggum (of The Simpsons) is picking his nose, alongside a message that reads: “I believe Daddy Trum Dum is rescuing millions of child victims from Hillary Clinton’s Intergalactic Sex Dungeon on Mars because 4Chan told me so.” Another depicts a Little Golden Book entitled “Everyone I don’t like is running a paedophile ring”, and an accompanying photo of celebrity conspiracist Alex Jones.
QAnon is not the only conspiracy theory to become the butt of internet puns. Consider those memes that poke fun at the anti-vaccination movement. These include the now-famous shot of a silver-haired man in a suit, leaning beside a beer bottle, with the caption: “I don’t always read fiction. But when I do, it’s an anti-vaccine article.”
These salvos might seem like harmless — and, indeed, often welcome — bursts of humour in a world where lives are being endangered by digital disinformation. But I’ve come to wonder whether it is ethical to laugh at conspiracy theories and their proponents? Can deriding these narratives and their adherents end up doing more harm than good?
In attempting to answer these questions, I’m going to focus on memes. An internet meme, as the definition goes, is a graphic that “spreads from one person to another within a given culture”. This quality of spreadability can be traced to factors such as the use of humour, and the incorporation of familiar symbols and people (such as characters from The Simpsons, or the ubiquity of Little Golden Books). Memes have commonly been deployed by conspiracy proponents to lure in unsuspecting net users. It’s unsurprising, then, that memes should also be weaponised by critics of conspiracies.
Conspiracy theories and conspiracy proponents
The term “conspiracy theory” has been defined as a narrative in which “important and, especially, incredible historical and social events … are the result of concerted and conscious actions of powerful, highly organized, and secretive groups that withhold the truth from the public.” Academic research has demonstrated that conspiracy theories tend to flourish in times of societal unrest and crisis. The past twelve months have been precisely such times, with the emergence of COVID-19 and the damage the pandemic has wrought on economies and lives. Conspiracy theories can provide their proponents with ways of explaining the apparently unexplainable, and of feeling in control amid a tsunami of tumultuousness.
There are other factors, too, that have fuelled conspiracy theories. These include a deep distrust of state and federal government. In Australia, this distrust is evident in the rhetoric of the anti-lockdown movement, and especially their attacks on Victorian premier Daniel Andrews (whom they have accused of keeping his state in hard lockdown in order to amplify his power over citizens).
The term “conspiracy proponents” refers to those who publicly support conspiracy theories. I use the term in preference to “conspiracy theorist”, which implies that individual internet users have concocted the narratives they espouse. In fact, the genesis of those narratives is often opaque (there has been considerable speculation, for instance, on the identity of the “Q” behind “QAnon”).
Laughing at conspiracy theories
Memes poking fun at conspiracy theories can serve an ethically sound purpose: to highlight their sheer ridiculousness and improbability. For example, most QAnon narratives don’t mention an “Intergalactic Sex Dungeon on Mars”. They do, however, trot out some outrageous guff, not the least of which is that the notoriously hubristic Trump is actually a global saviour. Memes and humour can make this outrageousness that much more explicit.
Moreover, laughing at conspiracy theories can have a “soothing and uplifting” effect for non-believers, in much the same way that memes about the peculiarities of life in the COVID-era can. These past twelve months have been grim, and that grimness has only been exacerbated by online horror stories of vampiric overlords, 5G towers, and governments using vaccines to render their citizens docile and compliant. Memes can provide a temporary respite from this miasma, while pointing out the dodginess of the narratives they’re satirising.
There is the risk that any media coverage of conspiracy theories can mean giving them free publicity — and potentially win them followers. This risk was made evident after an episode of South Park went to air which took aim at QAnon and anti-vaxxers. One QAnon proponent wrote on a platform affiliated with that movement: “S**t, we’ve [been] waiting on msm [main stream media] and they do it on a cartoon!!!!”
In fairness, however, the risk of unintended publicity necessarily accompanies any coverage of online conspiracies — including this article. The flipside is not reporting on those narratives. This has its own dangers, not least of which being that those narratives go publicly unchallenged. At any rate, turning a blind eye to online conspiracy theories is nigh-on impossible in the current, digitised mediascape.
Laughing at conspiracy proponents?
A quick Google search reveals numerous memes that poke fun at conspiracy theory proponents. One of these depicts a man in medical scrubs and the caption “vaccine research”, juxtaposed with a headless woman scrolling on her phone and the caption “Antivax-Moms Research”. The sexism reflected in this meme is problematic enough. Such material can also harm the person being made fun of. Giselinde Kuipers makes this point when she writes:
being laughed at leaves people with few elegant ways to respond. When laughed at, one can laugh along and probably feel bad about it, try to ignore it, or object and get angry and be accused of not having a sense of humour … Moreover, being an object of laughter often causes an acute sense of exclusion and humiliation, almost akin to social paralysis.
Exclusion and humiliation are never ethically justifiable, no matter how absurd or dangerous an individual’s views might be. Excluding and humiliating perpetuates an “us” and “them” hierarchy — “we” non-believers are at the top, and we’re looking down at “them”, those unthinking fools who’ve been duped by fairy tales. Indeed, exclusion and humiliation risks further hardening the belief of conspiracy proponents that some almighty entity has brainwashed the masses (those who disbelieve the conspiracy theory) and are out to punish the believers (who, according to this line of thinking, are awake to the grim truth).
Finally, laughing at conspiracy proponents threatens to trivialise the “often well-grounded concerns” they can express. For example, several anti-lockdown protesters took to social media to express horror at the snap lockdown of public housing towers in Victoria around July 2020. This horror was shared by many around Australia. The difference was that not all those who baulked at the abrupt display of government force believed the key tenets of the anti-lockdown movement: that lockdowns are unnecessary, and that the novel coronavirus is a fiction.
This is not to suggest that conspiracy proponents are lost lambs with no critical faculties, and that they should never be challenged on their views. There are ways of talking to, disagreeing with, and representing conspiracy proponents that do not frame them as stupid and lesser.
Memes can serve ethically sound functions. They can provide internet users with a much-needed laugh, while exposing the sheer ridiculousness and undesirability of the conspiracy theories they’re targeting. Whether memes or episodes of South Park can actually deter anybody from pledging their allegiance to QAnon or aligning with the anti-vaxx movement is the topic of another article.
But those memes that take aim at conspiracy proponents themselves miss the ethical mark in a major way. Such memes can exclude and humiliate these individuals, and pose no challenge to their faith in fantastical narratives.
Jay Daniel Thompson is Lecturer in Professional Communication in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University. His research investigates the possibility of ethical online communication in an era of disinformation, digital hostility, and conspiracy theories.
*** This article has been archived for your research. The original version from ABC News can be found here ***
