The man trying to save the world from toxic conspiracy theories

In 2017, thousands of people in Memphis, Tennessee joined the Women’s Marches taking place across the world. Among the numerous placards being carried by protesters, bearing such slogans as ‘Our bodies, our minds, our power’ and ‘Grab ’em by the patriarchy’, one seemed distinctly out of place.

‘Birds aren’t real’ was carried by an 18-year-old American psychology student named Peter McIndoe – the first notice in what McIndoe would go on to spin into an elaborate conspiracy theory, claiming that between 1959 and 2001 the US government had ‘mercilessly genocided’ more than 12 billion birds using a controlled virus, replacing them with robot spy birds.

Of course, birds are real – well, some of them, anyway. According to Claire Chronis, who later became a co-organiser, the idea of the prank – which has grown into a movement with more than 100,000 followers on Twitter, and a merchandising arm selling T-shirts with the slogans ‘If it flies it spies’ and ‘They are always watching’ – is to ‘fight lunacy with lunacy’ in the face of the deluge of misinformation and conspiracy theories overwhelming modern society. 

That objective is given added piquancy by the fact that another of McIndoe’s co-conspirators is Cameron Kasky, who survived the 2018 mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida and went on to co-found a student organisation advocating for tighter gun-control laws – and for his pains was accused of being a ‘crisis actor’ in the shooting. 

‘Birds aren’t real’, says Professor Sander van der Linden, a social psychologist specialising in misinformation and conspiracy theories, is a brilliant conceit. ‘It plays into all the important conspiracy narratives – people’s anxieties about surveillance, privacy, government intervention. And I love some of the aspects – why do birds sit on power lines? Because they have to recharge. That’s so brilliant. And I think if you dressed it up differently some people would buy it. But the mistake to get real traction is the claim that all birds are drones. The smarter conspiracy would be that only some birds are drones; and then you could have a whole subset of conspiracies about what type of bird, how they act, are the sounds real? And then you could record the sounds of each bird – does it sound like a bird or a machine? Then it could get real traction.’

It’s easy to see why van der Linden would enjoy Birds Aren’t Real. He has always been interested, he says, in why people believe certain things. As a boy growing up in the Netherlands he would experiment on his friends, seeing how much they would believe when he told them things that were completely untrue. ‘It was just to see how people would react. Obviously, I would then tell them it was untrue and I was only joking.’ He laughs. ‘I was debriefing them afterwards, as any good psychology experiment would do.’ 

Later, learning about the impact of Nazism on his Jewish family, he came to realise the more serious implications of the power of lies and propaganda. ‘And that intrigued me from a scientific point of view.’

Going on to complete a PhD at the London School of Economics, do research at Yale and then hold a position at Princeton, he became interested in conspiracy theories at a time, he says, when it was ‘kind of a fringe area in psychology; nobody really cared about it. I found it intriguing. I was also interested in pseudo-science, why people believe in the paranormal. And conspiracy theories are a form of magical thinking in some ways, so I became interested in them as 
a belief system, and how that relates to other things.’ 

Van der Linden, 36, is now professor of social psychology in society at the University of Cambridge, where he also directs the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab. An authority on understanding and combating misinformation, he has been described as a ‘cognitive immunologist’, and more colourfully as Cambridge’s professor of ‘defence against the dark arts’. He has also written a new book, Foolproof: Why We Fall for Misinformation and How To Build Immunity, which explores the psychology behind what he calls ‘the virus’ of misinformation and conspiracy theories – how they spread, why they are believed – and outlines strategies that he argues can ‘inoculate’ people against them. 

Van der Linden points out that conspiracy theories as we understand them are nothing new. As the Google Books Ngram Viewer shows, the term ‘conspiracy theory’ was appearing in books from the late 19th century, its use rising steeply from the time of JFK’s assassination in 1963 to its present peak. With the arrival of the internet, conspiracy theories multiplied – those surrounding 9/11 and many more have been widely disseminated. Now, with Covid, climate change and globalisation, the plethora of conspiracy theories, and the misinformation and fake news that sustain them, has grown incrementally, mirroring the widespread distrust in institutions, government and the media.

‘It’s a theme throughout history that whenever there are nasty things happening in the world – political, social, economic turbulence and uncertainty – conspiracy theories thrive,’ van der Linden says. ‘The difference now is we have a massive amplifier available to us that can expose hundreds of millions of people to these things in a matter of minutes.’ 
That amplifier is, of course, social media.  

In the US, half of adults now get their news at least some of the time from social media, where biases are carefully curated and filtered by algorithms to be disseminated to millions of like-minded individuals.

‘As the landscape becomes more fragmented and segregated, people are more selectively exposed to certain types of content,’ van der Linden says. ‘In theory, social media offers the opportunity to pierce the echo chambers and find out what other people are thinking, but in practice it doesn’t work like that. People use social media in a way to reinforce their beliefs, algorithms feed into that, and so it’s just making the problem of polarisation worse.

‘And it’s not just misinformation. It’s information overload. During the Covid pandemic there was a tweet every millisecond about Covid. We’re not used to getting so much information all the time from all these different sources.’ 

It is an environment where fake news and conspiracy theories flourish. In 2018, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were given access to the full historical archive of tweets to track the diffusion of true and false news stories on Twitter between 2006 and 2017. The study found that falsehoods spread ‘significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly’ than true claims in all categories of information. False news stories were 70 per cent more likely to be retweeted than true ones. And in keeping with the old aphorism that a lie can spread halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on, researchers calculated that, on average, it took the truth six times as long as false stories to reach 1,500 people.  

Another study – involving 16,442 Twitter accounts in the period around the 2016 US election, and led by David Lazer, professor of political science at Northeastern University, Boston – suggests that the proportion of people actually spreading fake news is quite small. Just 0.1 per cent of those users – known as ‘supersharers’ or ‘superspreaders’ – accounted for almost 80 per cent of fake-news sharing. Lazer found that a disproportionate amount of the content came from the Right, and that sharers of fake news were more likely to be conservative and older.

Fake news and misinformation can be driven based on a variety of motives, van der Linden says: to gain political currency, personal status or profit. Bogus ‘experts’ exploiting public anxiety to build follower numbers and merchandise sales proliferated during Covid.

Researching his book, van der Linden took part in a workshop with the internet activist and journalist Lyudmila Savchuk, who had spent time working undercover for the so-called Internet Research Agency in St Petersburg, where up to 1,000 employees using fake identities were posting 50 to 100 times a day, often with the aim of sowing discord in America. 
But conspiracy theories, van der Linden believes, also serve a multitude of purposes for believers, which much of the time are more important than any facts or logic that may refute them. ‘Whenever there is this existential dread about the future and politics, that’s where conspiracy theories thrive because they offer simple, certain explanations of what otherwise seem to be quite random and unrelated events.

‘What we know is that people who are high on conspiracy theories are lower on the need for complexity – they like more simple narratives. And they tend to be more politically extreme – whether on the Left or the Right. Some of the classic predictors are people who perceive lack of agency or control in their lives, who are low on trust in officialdom and government and high on paranoia.’

Van der Linden has drawn on a wealth of academic research – his own and others’ – for his book, as well as interviews with conspiracy theorists and believers. Then there is the example of an old friend who has followed what he says is a familiar trajectory. 

‘He was obsessed with 9/11 and the idea that it would not be possible for the main tower to have collapsed in a certain way. He was reading about that on early internet blogs. He’s a smart guy, but instead of spending his time with scientific sources, he went down a rabbit hole of alternative sources of information, becoming very suspicious of mainstream media and government, and seeing conspiracy everywhere.

‘Now, since the pandemic, he’s been homeschooling his kids and thinking the government is plotting against unvaccinated people.’

The rabbit hole is an apt metaphor for a conspiratorial mindset, where belief in one theory will often lead to a belief in the next – what’s known as the monological belief system, a self-sustaining world view, where one conspiracy theory is taken as evidence of another, and which van der Linden likens to ‘a multi-level marketing scheme’.

So the belief that Covid is a plot invented by the World Health Organization (WHO) and Bill Gates overlaps with the long-standing conspiracy theory about chemtrails – that condensation trails from aircraft actually consist of chemical agents sprayed for a variety of sinister purposes – and the belief that there is a cabal of ‘vampire’ paedophiles in the ‘deep state’ and Hollywood.

This is exemplified by the arch-conspiracy theorist David Icke, whose conspiracy of everything – from reptilian humanoids to ‘nano-technology chips’ in Covid vaccines – gained astonishing traction during the pandemic. Years ago, answering the criticism that he saw ‘conspiracies everywhere’, Icke said, ‘I don’t. I see one conspiracy that takes different forms.’ 

‘When you examine a lot of these cases it’s never that people believe in a single conspiracy because they have good evidence,’ van der Linden says. ‘It’s always connected to a myriad of other conspiracies, and people then get dragged into a whole world view.’ 

So deeply entrenched does conspiratorial thinking become, he says, that even contradictory assertions can be reconciled – for example, that Covid is both a biological weapon developed in Wuhan and caused by 5G mobile masts.

‘People are able to allow for some local inconsistencies in the belief system as long as there is some higher-order global coherence that explains those inconsistencies away. So when you attack some of these specific beliefs, people will just jump to higher-order meta explanations that make it all work out.’

The ‘higher-order’ explanations may take different names – it’s ‘the Illuminati’, ‘the cabal’, the ‘deep state’ or the ‘New World Order’. The most recent supposed manifestation of this is the World Economic Forum, whose founder and executive chairman Klaus Schwab – whom few outside the annual WEF conferences at Davos could have identified even two years ago – has come to occupy the same bogeyman status in conspiratorial thinking as Bill Gates and George Soros.

A YouGov-Cambridge poll conducted in 2021 found that 31 per cent of Americans thought it was definitely or probably true that regardless of who is in charge of governments, a single group of people secretly control world events. Seventeen per cent thought the same of the central QAnon theory that Satan-worshipping paedophiles have taken control of parts of the US government and mainstream US media.

This has spawned a host of supplementary conspiracy theories to do with child trafficking. In 2020, a claim that expensive cabinets sold by the US furniture company Wayfair, ‘listed with girls’ names’, actually had children hidden inside them, went viral in conspiracy circles. That was followed in 2021 by the claim that US Navy Seals had found trafficked children and dead bodies onboard the Ever Given, the container ship that became stranded in the Suez Canal. 

Van der Linden believes that the spread of QAnon illustrates another powerful attraction of conspiracy theories – the sense of belonging. ‘Often people who endorse those explanations feel marginalised, and excluded from society; that really makes people crank up the desire for connection and affiliation, and it doesn’t really matter what form that takes. 

‘One function of groups is to define who we are. If there’s an online group telling you that if you endorse these beliefs, we’re going to support you and you’ll be a part of a community, then you really start to identify and become part of something that feels meaningful – and I think QAnon does that. It went from being a single conspiracy to becoming a movement, and that relational aspect has become really important.’

The cognitive psychologist and author Steven Pinker has theorised that QAnon might be likened to ‘a live-action role-playing game with fans avidly trading clues and following leads’. Its progenitor, Pizzagate, a 2016 claim that Hillary Clinton ran a child-sex ring out of the basement of a Washington pizzeria, Pinker writes, ‘also had a make-believe quality’. But these beliefs, as implausible as they may be, have dangerous consequences. Pizzagate culminated in a man storming the pizzeria with a rifle – only to discover there was no basement. 

‘When I started working on all this some 12 years ago, people thought conspiracy theories were a joke – people out in New Mexico, Area 51 looking for aliens,’ van der Linden says. ‘But people have come to appreciate that while some conspiracy theories may seem harmless, others are quite dangerous. It can lead to the persecution of whole groups, to personal harm; they can undermine public health and democracy. Elections are decided by small margins. If a minority of people become consumed with conspiracies and it affects their vote, that’s not healthy for the democratic process. 

‘We want people to have a healthy dose of scepticism, but not of conspiratorial thinking.’

So what is the best way to combat misinformation and conspiracies? Fighting them with common sense and fact would seem to be one option. For example, as van der Linden points out, many conspiracy theories are obviously implausible simply because of the numbers that would be involved in keeping the conspiracy a secret. The scientist David Robert Grimes has estimated that for conspiracies involving more than a thousand individuals, ‘intrinsic failure would be imminent’. He suggests that if Nasa had truly faked the moon landings, for example, it would have required more than 400,000 employees to have been complicit.

Current measures for fighting misinformation or conspiracy theories usually revolve around debunking and fact-checking. But attempting to disprove a conspiracy theory with logic or factual evidence will often have precisely the opposite of the intended effect, making the believer more entrenched in their view. It is likely to be taken as just more evidence of how perfidious the conspiracy is that the person or body arguing against the theory is part of the conspiracy – an accusation frequently levelled at fact-checking organisations.  

More effective than debunking, van der Linden says, is arming people with the cognitive abilities to recognise online misinformation when they see it. He uses the analogy of misinformation and conspiracy thinking as a virus that can be inoculated against by ‘prebunking’, or pre-emptively exposing people to a weakened dose of fake news or examples of the techniques used to manipulate people, in order to build up ‘cognitive antibodies’ to make them more resistant when targeted in the real world.

With colleagues at Cambridge and the collaboration of game developers, in 2018 he devised Bad News, a game in which players adopt the role of a fake-news producer and are taken through six techniques used in the production of misinformation, also detailed in his book (see below): discrediting, stirring up emotions such as fear or anger, polarisation, impersonation, spreading conspiracy theories and trolling. 

In 2020, van der Linden and his colleagues, in collaboration with the Cabinet Office and the WHO, developed another game, Go Viral!, to help people spot fake news about Covid. 

Follow-up research, he says, shows that through administering and refuting a weakened dose of the virus, people become better at spotting fake news, more confident in their ability to discern fact from fiction, and less likely to share it with people in their social media network. Van der Linden suggests such strategies should be part of education policy. 
‘Young people are the future citizens and leaders of the country; the point is not to tell them what to believe but to inoculate them against these techniques.’

This point has been echoed by Vinton Cerf, vice-president and chief internet evangelist for Google, who is described as one of ‘the fathers of the internet’. In an interview with the BBC in December, Cerf suggested an ‘internet driver’s licence’, for which people would be taught how to do safe networking. ‘Just like you tell a child, look both ways before you cross the street, you want people to be aware of the fact that when they enter the online environment, there are hazards involved.’

Both Bad News and Go Viral! are available online. 

‘Science doesn’t have all the answers,’ says van der Linden. ‘Scientists make mistakes; sometimes not all the pieces of the puzzle fit together. But that doesn’t mean that there’s some conspiracy. That’s the most important thing for people to remember. Just because things don’t add up, it doesn’t automatically make it a conspiracy.

‘The first objective should be to get [conspiracy theorists] to question the certainty with which they endorse their beliefs rather than trying to change them. That’s really the only way to reverse this stuff with the hardcore deniers. Just as it takes a long time to get radicalised by a cult, it will take a long time to come back from that.’
He sighs. ‘You just have to be patient.’

Foolproof: Why We Fall for Misinformation and How To Build Immunity, by Sander van der Linden, is out on February 16 (Fourth Estate, £22); books.telegraph.co.uk