Birds Aren’t Real: Inside a Gen Z Conspiracy Theory

From The New York Times, I’m Annie Correal. This is The Daily.

A new movement is underway to confront the growing threat of misinformation — by creating misinformation. Today: The improbable story of the group behind that movement, Birds Aren’t Real. I spoke with my colleague Taylor Lorenz.

It’s Wednesday, February 9.

Hi, Taylor. How are you?

Hi, I’m good.

So when you published this article back in December on Birds Aren’t Real, it was probably the first time that a lot of people had ever heard of this, quote unquote, “conspiracy.” It certainly was the first time I had heard of it. So at a very basic level, what is Birds Aren’t Real?

Birds Aren’t Real is a fake conspiracy movement, mostly supported by young people online that purports that birds are not real, but were actually replaced by government drones back in the 1970s. In the conspiracy lore, every bird is actually a surveillance tool by the state.

That’s pretty funny.

Yeah, it’s a parody conspiracy. It’s almost a satire social movement. People know that this is not real.

Got it. So then why did you get interested in covering this? I mean, things do come and go a lot on the internet, and it sounds like no one really believes in this. So why, in your mind, was this fake conspiracy worth reporting on?

So as an internet culture writer, I’m constantly keeping an eye on new trends, and they do come and go. But this one really had staying power, and it seemed to speak to something deep within the psyche of Gen Z.

A-ha.

I just noticed that the followers were very young and very dedicated, and their movement was manifesting increasingly in the real world.

What stuck out to me was this huge protest that they organized outside Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco last November —

— to protest the bird logo.

I was like, oh, my God, there’s so many of them. And they were screaming with megaphones.

There’s also been dozens of rallies on college campuses across the country in the past year. It just sort of started to enter into mainstream youth culture in a way that it hadn’t in years prior. So I started to think, I’ve got to get to the bottom of how this started and why it seems to resonate so deeply with Gen Z. The problem is that the leader of Birds Aren’t Real is a bit of a troll.

He would give these interviews where he’s in character and fully embodying this conspiracy with a totally straight face.

So I thought, OK, how am I going to get to the bottom of Birds Aren’t Real if the founder is playing this character all the time? But after years of covering internet and youth culture and having so many sources in this world, I finally got in touch with him. I talked to him off the record. And then finally he agreed to go on the record out of character as himself.

His name is Peter McIndoe. And he’s a 23-year-old college dropout. And in talking to him, it turns out that his background actually has a lot to do with how Birds Aren’t Real got started.

He grew up in a pretty conservative and religious community with seven siblings outside Cincinnati. And then he moved to rural Arkansas.

He was homeschooled.

But he said that from a young age, he started to realize he was a little bit different from the rest of his community. So for instance, he told me a story about one time when he said that he didn’t believe in God —

— and was told the devil had gotten a hold of him, essentially.

Oh, wow.

Yeah. He’s a black sheep.

So he increasingly went and turned to the internet.

It was kind of those places that let him see the outside world and helped him gain more perspective on the situation that he was in.

Which is interesting because I think we often think about conspiratorial thinking thriving on the internet, and it does. But for Peter, it’s actually his real life that feels dominated by conspiracy and the internet that feels like real life.

Yeah, exactly. So from Peter’s point of view, he couldn’t get away from homeschool fast enough to leave for college, which he finally did in 2016, when he ended up at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville.

At one point, he goes to visit a friend in Memphis in 2017. It’s January right after Trump was elected, and there’s a huge Women’s March downtown.

Along with that Women’s March, there was also counterprotesters, so pro-Trump protesters shouting at the Women’s March.

So he’s watching all of this chaos unfold in front of him and just the tension in the air.

He decides to rip a poster off the street and write —

— Birds Aren’t Real.

And then he joined the counter-protest to the Women’s March and started chanting “birds aren’t real” and holding up his sign.

And it wasn’t really intended to be anything, but a woman had actually been filming him that day, unbeknownst to him. And she put that video on Facebook.

It went wild and started to get lots of attention in the Memphis area. And it became this kind of homegrown joke.

And as this is happening, Peter is back at school in Arkansas.

He thinks it’s hilarious, so he decides to lean into it.

He sets up social media accounts for Birds Aren’t Real.

And he begins posting just the most ridiculous things. So for example, he posted a picture of a seagull and wrote in all caps: “Warning, stay away from seagulls. They have just been given a firmware update by the government that gives them the ability to steal your credit card information and Social Security information by just looking at you. Leave the beaches now.”

And these posts start gaining traction all over the country. Peter gets together with some friends. They start posting videos where he’s in character and building out the lore of Birds Aren’t Real even more.

I remember seeing these on my feed.

He reveals how the government has made it appear that birds are real.

So Peter and his friends are really leaning in.

Oh, yeah.

And then they start producing more and more elaborate videos.

At one point, he hired an actor to portray a former CIA agent —

— who confessed to working on bird drone surveillance.

Oh, my God.

Yeah.

And Peter starts amassing a real following of fan base. Thousands of people are watching and sharing all of his videos and posts. It becomes this viral phenomenon. But beyond engaging on social media, people actually want to join in.

Peter and his friends sell Birds Aren’t Real merchandise, so T-shirts, sweatshirts, hats, stickers. They have pictures of birds and words that say things like, “Bird Watching Goes Both Ways,” or the slogan, “If it flies, it lies.” And in 2018, he drops out of college to do this full-time.

Whoa.

His fans became more like followers of the movement, and that movement became known as the Bird Brigade. The movement goes from hundreds of people to thousands of people, to tens of thousands of people to hundreds of thousands of people. They even formed chapters on college campuses across the country, and they host meetups. They wear their Birds Aren’t Real merchandise to football games. And they just kind of hang out. It’s almost like a social club. And over the last year or so, the Bird Brigade has really begun to mobilize for street protests — things like that silly Twitter rally that I mentioned, but also getting involved with more serious issues.

What kind of serious issues?

Well, Peter told me that the Bird Brigade has started to actively show up at protests that have nothing to do with birds at all. He described a scene last year at the University of Cincinnati where an anti-abortion protest was taking place.

The Bird Brigade chapter at the university was watching this happen and decided to get involved.

They ended up kind of taking over the anti-abortion protest.

We’ll be right back.

So Taylor, it’s clear that Birds Aren’t Real has become something much bigger than just a funny internet joke. It’s actually mobilizing its followers to go out onto the street. But I guess I’m wondering why. Why does Peter think that so many young people have found it so compelling?

Well, first off, I do think that some people just find it funny and entertaining. But in talking with Peter, I also think that there is something more going on here that has a lot to do with the world that Gen Z has come up in.

And so Birds Aren’t Real, this satirical art project, provides a way for them to understand what feels like a world gone mad.

And so I think young people have kind of coalesced around it because it’s a way to kind of fight and poke fun at the conspiracy take-over of the world at the same time.

And it’s a way for them to feel less alone. A lot of young supporters who I interviewed as well talked about just feeling alone in their communities. A lot of these kids have been in remote school for over a year. They’re feeling completely isolated. And ironically, when people feel that way, they often turn to real conspiracy movements. But Birds Aren’t Real has kind of allowed teenagers to kind of find meaning and connect in this way through this fake conspiracy.

And it’s also led Peter to think differently about his own upbringing and about how easily conspiratorial thinking can take hold, because it serves this real function for people.

He realizes that the real conspiracies that are flourishing on the internet, like QAnon and others, allow people who believe in them to feel like they have this agency over their lives.

Hmm. I’m reminded that he said he felt a lot of ideological loneliness growing up. And as you said, that can drive people to actual conspiracies. So it strikes me that that loneliness could have led Peter down a very different path when he went to the internet looking for a sense of belonging.

Right. I do think it could have led him to a very dark place. And the larger concern here is that this kind of loneliness and the sheer amount of misinformation on these online platforms is actually driving unprecedented numbers of people towards conspiratorial thinking. And it’s not just Peter that could have gone down this darker path.

What do you mean?

A lot of people who I talked to who joined the Birds Aren’t Real movement have similar backgrounds to Peter’s. They grew up feeling disconnected from their own family members or communities who fell victim to this type of conspiratorial thinking. So I mean, who knows where they could have found themselves on the internet? But what we do know is that they ended up here in a place that’s not dark.

Right.

They’ve collectively used the internet to kind of take this conspiratorial thinking, or desire for community, and build something completely different and new. The point of this movement is to kind of critique this culture that we’ve all found ourselves in, to skewer it and also just to kind of laugh at all of it.

But Taylor, our colleagues have reported quite a bit on how some things that start off as memes or jokes on the internet have, on occasion, morphed into something quite a bit darker and even led to violence. Does Peter worry at all that his idea to mock misinformation with misinformation could backfire if people don’t get the joke and actually start to think that birds aren’t real?

Well, I think that’s part of the reason he decided to break character and talk to me on the record. I think that the movement was reaching this critical mass where he started to kind of realize that it was getting bigger than him. And he started to worry. Peter’s biggest fear is that anybody takes him too seriously. And he didn’t want to attract any actual conspiracy theorists. And he wanted something that he could point to that was on the record to show people so that they understood. And so I know this is something that he thinks about deeply.

But he is also not breaking character online. Even after we published our article, he went on Instagram and Twitter saying that The New York Times is in cahoots with the government and this is all a pro-bird propaganda campaign. And his followers were eating it up. They were like, yes, Peter, birds aren’t real. I can’t believe this happened to you. They absolutely loved it.

And Peter has continued to troll local news.

He even pretended to choke on his coffee in one interview recently.

So the satire is very much alive and well.

Well, it sounds like he’s going to have a lot to work with when this episode airs.

Yeah, exactly. [LAUGHS]

Well, thank you, Taylor, so much.

Thank you so much for having me.

We’ll be right back.

Here’s what else you need to know today. On Tuesday, in its latest act of aggression, the Russian government dispatched six large landing ships capable of carrying thousands of troops to the waters off Ukraine. The move is raising the possibility that Russia, which has already surrounded Ukraine on three sides with more than 100,000 soldiers, could now invade it from the sea, as well as from land.

And three more states, Connecticut, Oregon and Virginia, are moving to end mask mandates inside schools, joining New Jersey and Delaware, which announced plans to end their mask requirement on Monday. The changes are in defiance of C.D.C. guidance, which still recommends universal masking inside schools, a message White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki reaffirmed on Tuesday during a news conference.

Meanwhile, New York plans to drop its stringent indoor mask mandate, ending a requirement that businesses ask customers for proof of full vaccination or require mask wearing at all times. But the change does not affect the mask mandate at New York schools.

Today’s episode was produced by Rachelle Bonja, Chelsea Daniel and Austin Mitchell. It was edited by Rachel Quester and Paige Cowett; fact-checked by Caitlin Love; contains original music by Dan Powell and Marion Lozano; and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly.

That’s it for The Daily. I’m Annie Correal. See you tomorrow.