Why Have So Many People Lost Their Grip On Reality In 2020?
To absolutely no one's surprise, the toxic combination of stay-at-home requirements and social media would be a fruitful place to start. JL
Alex Hern reports in The Guardian:
The social network has always prided itself on connecting
people, and when the ability to socialise in person, or even leave the
house, was curtailed, Facebook was there to pick up the slack. But those same services have also enabled the creation of a “perfect storm for misinformation”. And
with real-life interaction suppressed to counter the spread of the
virus, it’s easier than ever for people to fall down a rabbit hole
of deception, where the endpoint may not simply be a decline in
vaccination rates, but the
end of consensus reality as we know it.
As
with many others in Britain, lockdown hit Rachel and her husband,
Philip, hard. Almost overnight, the couple, both in their early 50s,
found themselves cut off from friends, family and colleagues. Before the
Covid-19 outbreak, they had both been working every day; now Philip
found himself furloughed, while Rachel was put on rotation with other
essential staff, working fewer shifts at odd hours. They were unable to
meet up with their four adult sons and daughters. They had to attend a
family funeral while remaining socially distanced.
Initially, Rachel coped in the way many others did. She played more
video games than normal, and felt stressed at work, but as far as
possible she managed. Her husband didn’t. For him, it seemed there must
be more to it than the authorities struggling to cope with a novel virus
and evolving expert advice. “The regularly changing and conflicting
information that was coming from the government added to the feeling in
him that they were making things up or covering something up,” Rachel
says now.
Initially, Philip and Rachel (their names have been changed for this
article) discussed his fears, but as lockdown went on, their
conversations stopped. Philip was frustrated that Rachel wasn’t taking
his concerns seriously: someone had to be benefiting from the situation,
he insisted, and events such as Dominic Cummings’ Barnard Castle “eye
test” only increased his belief that “they” knew the pandemic was fake,
and the nation was being kept indoors for a more sinister purpose.
Philip began to research what this sinister purpose might be. That,
Rachel says, is what led him to QAnon.
It’s hard to describe the movement that Philip fell into. QAnon
has its roots in the “pizzagate” conspiracy, which emerged four years
ago after users poring over hacked Democratic party emails on the
message board 4chan said that, if you replaced the word “pizza” with
“little girl”, it looked as if they were discussing eating children.
That claim – whether it was made in jest or sincerity is impossible to
tell – spiralled into allegations of a vast paedophilic conspiracy
centred on Comet Pizza, a restaurant in Washington DC.
A year later, a 4chan user with the handle “Q Clearance Patriot”
appeared, claiming to be a government insider tasked with sharing
“crumbs” of intel about Donald Trump’s planned counter-coup against the
deep state forces frustrating his presidency. As Q’s following grew, the
movement became known as the Storm – as in, “the calm before …” – and
then QAnon, after its founder and prophet.At that
point, QAnon was a relatively understandable conspiracy theory: it had a
clear set of beliefs rooted in support for Trump and in the
increasingly cryptic posts attributed to Q (by then widely believed to
be a group of people posting under one name).
Now, though, it’s less clearcut. There’s no one set of beliefs that
define a QAnon adherent. Most will claim some form of mass paedophilic
conspiracy; some, particularly in the US, continue to focus on Trump’s
supposed fightback. But the web of beliefs has become all-encompassing.
One fan-produced map of all the “revelations” linked to the group
includes references to Julius Caesar, Atlantis and the pharaohs of Egypt
in one corner, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and 5G in another, the
knights of Malta in a third, and the Fukushima meltdown in a fourth –
all tied together with a generous helping of antisemitism, from the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion to hatred of George Soros. QAnon isn’t
one conspiracy theory any more: it’s all of them at once.
In September, BuzzFeed News made the stylistic decision to refer to
the movement as a “collective delusion”. “There’s more to the convoluted
entity than the average reader might realise,” wrote BuzzFeed’s
Drusilla Moorhouse and Emerson Malone. “But delusion does illustrate the
reality better than conspiracy theory does. We are discussing a mass of
people who subscribe to a shared set of values and debunked ideas,
which inform their beliefs and actions.”
At
first, QAnon was a largely US phenomenon, with limited penetration in
the UK. The pandemic, however, has changed that. According to recent
polling by Hope Not Hate, one in four people in Britain
now agree with some of the basic conspiracies it has promulgated: that
“secret satanic cults exist and include influential elites”, and that
“elites in Hollywood, politics, the media” are secretly engaging in
large-scale child trafficking and abuse. Nearly a third believe there is
“a single group of people who secretly control events and rule the
world together”, and almost a fifth say that Covid-19 was intentionally
released as part of a “depopulation plan”.
For Philip, trapped at home and searching for an explanation for a
global pandemic, when all he could find was a void of information, QAnon
was fertile territory. He already spent most of his time while
furloughed on his phone looking for answers. What was the real reason
for everyone being forced inside? How did the virus start? Who started
it?
“In his mind, there had to be a reason for it,” Rachel says. Inevitably, his search took in Facebook, where the site’s recommendation algorithms were quick to connect him to individuals on similar quests.“Ultimately, it led to him becoming brainwashed,” she says.
For many, the existence of Facebook – and its sister products,
including WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger – has been a lifeline in
this period. The social network has always prided itself on connecting
people, and when the ability to socialise in person, or even leave the
house, was curtailed, Facebook was there to pick up the slack.
But those same services have also enabled the creation of what one
professional factchecker calls a “perfect storm for misinformation”. And
with real-life interaction suppressed to counter the spread of the
virus, it’s easier than ever for people to fall deep down a rabbit hole
of deception, where the endpoint may not simply be a decline in
vaccination rates or the election of an unpleasant president, but the
end of consensus reality as we know it. What happens when your basic
understanding of the world is no longer the same as your neighbour’s?
And can Facebook stop that fate coming to us all?
6:24
Since
its foundation, in Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard dorm room, Facebook has
tackled its share of challenges. Some have stayed fairly constant: no
social network gets many users without needing to tackle spam, for
instance, though the Facebook of 2004 would struggle to remove the 3.3bn
junk posts that the company took down in the first half of this year.
Others are unique to a company with 2.7 billion users that operates
in almost every country in the world. Facebook has become a centre point
of civil society. It’s more than just a place to share photos and plan
parties: it’s where people read news, arrange protests, engage in
debate, play games and watch bands. And that means that all the problems
of civil society are now problems for Facebook: bullying, sexual abuse,
political polarisation and conspiracy theorists all existed before the
social network, but all took on new contours as they moved online.
And this year they really moved online. As the initial
lockdown was imposed across much of the world, people’s relationship to
the internet, and to Facebook in particular, evolved rapidly. Stuck
socially distancing, people turned to social networking to fill an
emotional void.
Suddenly, the company found itself staring at unprecedented demands.
“Our busiest time of the year is New Year’s Eve,” says Nicola
Mendelsohn, Facebook’s vice-president for Europe, the Middle East and
Africa, over a Zoom call from her London home. “And we were seeing the
equivalent of New Year’s Eve every single day.” It was, she says, the
inevitable result of having “almost the entire planet at home at the
same time”.
Rachel agrees. “I believe the lockdown played a huge part in altering
people’s perception of reality,” she says. When Covid restrictions came
in, the rules of social interaction were rewritten. We suddenly stopped
meeting friends in pubs, at the coffee point or by the school gates,
and our lives moved online. And for many of us, “online” meant “on
Facebook”.
I first heard Rachel’s story from QAnonCasualties, a forum on the
social news site Reddit where she, and thousands like her, have
congregated to seek advice and support after their loved ones fell into
the cult. Her first post, in July this year, was titled: “I’ve finally
reached the end of my tether.” She described a marriage of 25 years, and
a family with four grownup children, being shattered by a husband who
had sunk “further and further into this conspiracy”.
“It’s got the stage where I no longer understand him or even
recognise him,” she wrote. Others echoed her story. Posts with titles
such as “Grieving my dad while he’s still alive” and “Today I filed for
divorce from my QAnon-obsessed husband” rub shoulders with pleas for
help from those who still hope they can win loved ones back.
Beyond the heartbreak and anguish on QAnonCasualties, there is a
common thread: a feeling that their friends and relatives are inhabiting
a different reality. “On all levels, from the old-school conspiracist
who just wants to uncover corruption to the alien interdimensional
vampire demon QAnon believer, they ignore reality and latch on to
narratives that support their version of reality,” says Robert Johnson,
one of the moderators of the board, adding that most of the recent posts
are from people radicalised in lockdown.
Early
on in the pandemic, Facebook moved to make the most of the situation.
As almost all of its 50,000 or so employees, as well as its army of
contractors,were sent home, and Zuckerberg talked up
the benefits of remote working, the company handed out grants to small
businesses to help them switch to digital operation – $100m (£79m)
globally, and another $100m in the US – and retooled its product
offerings to take advantage of the new normal. But for all the work it
put into smoothing the transition to lockdown life, Facebook also knew
it had a problem brewing. The company’s never-ending battle with
misinformation on its platforms was about to step into overdrive.
For a long time, the company had resisted acting on the problem.
Moderation is hard enough already: simply finding and removing every
example of unambiguously banned content on Facebook is a huge task, with
comparatively easy-to-automate searches for things such as adult
content still throwing up dizzying numbers of edge cases and errors.
When it came to tackling misinformation, Facebook had a stated
philosophical objection. “As a principle, in a democracy, I believe
people should decide what is credible, not tech companies,” Zuckerberg
told an audience at Georgetown University last year. But the company was
also motivated by the fact that misinformation isn’t as straightforward
to identify as nudity, graphic violence or even hate speech.
For one thing, there isn’t even a commonly accepted definition. It is
a sibling of disinformation, which is the deliberate spreading of
falsehoods. But the line between “misinformation” and simple
“inaccuracies” is blurry. Generally, the focus is on the potential for
harm. A rumour that, say, the Canadian emo pop star Avril Lavigne was
secretly replaced by a body double in the late 2000s is probably untrue,
but unlikely to qualify as misinformation. Conversely, a rumour that
Trump died of Covid-19 in early October and has been secretly replaced
by a body double almost certainly does.
But
wherever the line is drawn, the problem is the same: to find out if
something is misinformation, you need to know the truth. Were Facebook
to ban it directly, the company would effectively need to run an entire
journalistic enterprise within its own moderation team.
As a compromise, Facebook partnered with journalists in 2017. Around
the world, independent factchecking organisations were given funding and
tools to mark viral posts on Facebook as true or false (there are a
number of other categories, including “satirical”, “altered” or “missing
context”). If the posts were false, their reach – the extent to which
the Facebook algorithm showed them to others – would be diminished, and
users would have to click through a warning sign to read them.
So far, the programme has been a mixed success. Reducing the reach of
false content certainly helps: just a few months after it was launched,
Facebook said a factcheck would lead to 80% fewer viewers of a piece of
false content. But factcheckers have complained about the limits placed
on them by the social network, ranging from restrictions on their
ability to factcheck political adverts to a lack of feedback from
Facebook about how much, or little, their work is actually helping.
And that was before Covid hit. “We went early as a company in closing
down globally,” says Mendelsohn. “You would class us as conservative in
that respect, and we will be conservative coming out as well.” Now, six
months on, Facebook has a skeleton team in some of its offices and
datacentres, and employees coming in to work on the company’s augmented
and virtual reality products, such as its Oculus headsets. But the bulk
of its staff are still working from home, something that Zuckerberg has said is likely to continue well past the end of the crisis.
Facebook’s moderation staff have been pulled off some of the most
sensitive work, owing to data security concerns and fears for the
employees’ own mental health. The soul-grinding task of scouring the
platform for livestreamed suicides and videos of graphic violence has
already led to a $52m settlement paid to more than 11,000 moderators in the US, and a lawsuit in Ireland
over allegations of post-traumatic stress disorder, and that was when
contractors were based in offices, with the support that brings.
By early April, the company was having to bring its diminished
resources to bear against some of the most viral misinformation it had
ever seen. (The unfortunate double meaning of the world “viral” was
noted by nearly everyone I interviewed for this piece, as was the
cliched-yet-useful approach of modelling misinformation as something
spreading like a disease.)
“It became clear, very quickly, that there would be different
approaches to how people would talk about, debate and discuss the issues
of the virus,” Mendelsohn says. “And so we work through our harmful
misinformation policy that we’ve had in place for about two and a half
years now, where we have a very specific policy about taking down
anything that could contribute to physical harm.”
Of
course, the company has a lot of leeway in how it defines “physical
harm”. It had applied that to infectious diseases before. A measles
outbreak in Samoa, for instance, saw a parallel outbreak in harmful
untruths, which Facebook acted to limit.But for years,
Facebook has argued that the harm caused by the broader
anti-vaccination movement didn’t cross that threshold, and allowed the
groups to flourish on the platform. In March 2019, it relented slightly,
and banned anti-vax ads that include misinformation about vaccines; in
October this year, it went further, and banned all anti-vax advertising,
except for that with a political message. “Organic content” – posts and
groups advocating against vaccines – is still allowed.
With Covid-19, the company went even further, attempting to limit the
misinformation while also filling in the “information voids” that led
people such as Philip down their dark path. Links pinned at the top of
feeds have taken more than 2 billion people, Mendelsohn says, to
resources from health authorities around the world, detailing what is
known about the virus.
But those efforts can’t stop the tide. “There was just an explosion
of interest in one singular topic, for very obvious reasons,” says Tom
Phillips, the editor-in-chief of Full Fact, one of Facebook’s two UK
factchecking partners. “In the UK, we generally see massive spikes of
traffic around elections, and we had one at the end of 2019. The
pandemic dwarfed that.” And matching that explosion in interest was an
explosion in the supply of misinformation, much of it delivered by
questionable sources.
“The industries that many celebrities work in – film, music, sport –
were among the hardest hit by shutdowns. So even more than most of us,
they suddenly found themselves with nothing to do but sit on Twitter,”
Phillips says. “Not all of them did a Taylor Swift, spending the time
recording an album. Some of them started sharing wild rumours to
millions of followers instead.” This, then, is how we end up with Ian
Brown, the former frontman of the Stone Roses, declaring that conspiracy
theorist is “a term invented by the lame stream media to discredit
those who can smell and see through the government/media lies and
propaganda”.
Brown’s obsession with revealing the “truth” about coronavirus has
spread from his social-media posts to his recorded music: the anti-mask,
anti-vaccine Little Seed Big Tree,
with lyrics including “Masonic lockdown, in your home town / Get behind
your doors for the new world order” joins Van Morrison’s No More
Lockdown (“No more taking of our freedom / And our God-given rights /
Pretending it’s for our safety”) in the canon of hits championed by
QAnon supporters.
Where celebrities at least have a coterie of minders, publicists and
agents begging them not to follow Brown and Morrison down this route,
the rest of us had to rely on our friends and family, says
QAnonCasualties’ Johnson. And then, suddenly, we couldn’t. “Some of
these folk probably weren’t too into QAnon before the lockdown,” Johnson
says. “They would have been shot down by co-workers when bringing it
up.” Without that kind of reality check, they were able to fall further.
Full
Fact’s Phillips agrees. “Personal contact takes you out of the rabbit
hole. You know, it can be a very direct, ‘No, mate, that’s nonsense,’
but it could also just be taking people away from the singular focus
that conspiracy rabbit holes require. Just by introducing other topics
of conversation.” Lockdown removed those opportunities for intervention
at a stroke.
And so, furloughed and stuck indoors, Rachel’s husband, Philip, sank
deeper and deeper into the alternative reality that QAnon presented.
Although Facebook had been the open end of the rabbit hole, it proved
too restrictive for him: even the algorithmically mediated interactions
with his friends and family were becoming hostile and argumentative, as
they tried in vain to push back against the cult.
He started new social media accounts, dedicated only to the
conspiracy. When Rachel found one of those, and saw what it was sharing,
she felt “physically sick”; she realised her husband hadn’t simply
picked up a few odd beliefs, but joined a full-blown cult. “How do you
talk to someone who has been brainwashed but who believes that it is you that is the brainwashed one,” she asked Reddit.
In August, things hit rock bottom. Philip’s focus had grown from
coronavirus-specific conspiracies to the wider web of evil posited by
QAnon. His YouTube recommendations were no longer about mobile phones
and cars; they were for clips putting forward conspiracy theories and
fabrications. YouTube has historically been one of the
most permissive of the major social media platforms, with few policies
against misinformation: instead, the site puts links to Wikipedia pages
underneath contentious videos (and deletes only the most egregiously
false ones). But even YouTube’s filters started getting in the way, and
so he switched again, to the video host BitChute, where “Fall of the
Cabal”, a notorious QAnon video primer, shares space with content
creators recounting lurid stories of having seen an infamous – yet
entirely fictional – video of Hillary Clinton eating a young child
alive, chasing a supposed high that can be gained from drinking the
blood of a terrified child.
In Philip’s eyes, Rachel was now an idiot, who believed mainstream
media. “I became a ‘normie’ who needed to wake up and understand what
was really going on,” she says. “He was unable to stick to one topic. If
I said something about how we were struggling with social distancing at
work, he would respond with a furious diatribe about Soros, Clinton,
Bill Gates, 5G and vaccines that control and kill people.”
For Rachel, the final straw was when her husband claimed to have seen
a video incriminating a member of the Hollywood elite: a clip, he said,
of Tom Hanks “with a three-year-old girl”. For Rachel, who works with
safeguarded children, the implication was obscene. If her husband really
had seen such a clip, then no matter how it was produced –
Photoshopped, edited together – it must have started as real child abuse
imagery. That a cult ostensibly focused on saving children could
somehow persuade her husband to engage in sharing such material
disgusted her. She started packing her bags the next morning.
By
the time QAnon adherents are that far in the rabbit hole, the consensus
on the QAnonCasualties board is that it’s hard to rescue them. It’s not
easy to overturn someone’s sense of reality, but even harder to restore
it once it has been lost. And so the focus is on preventing people from
falling down the rabbit hole in the first place: tackling QAnon at the
more acceptable end.
In the UK, that largely means the “Save the Children” movement, not
to be confused with the charity of the same name. One of its largest
groups, Freedom for the Children UK (FFTCUK), was created in July by
Laura Ward, 36, who told the BBC she
had a “spiritual awakening” that motivated her to organise during the
lockdown. By late August, the FFTCUK Facebook page had become large
enough to organise a 500-strong rally in central London, campaigning to
“raise the awareness of child exploitation and human trafficking”. Ward
denied any links to QAnon, but the London rally – one of 200nationwide
that day – was full of QAnon-related slogans, from warnings that
“pizzagate is real” to the catchphrase “Where we go one, we go all”
(shortened to “WWG1WGA”).
In October, Facebook announced a blanket ban on QAnon-related groups,
after earlier trying to ban only those arms of the movement linked to
violence. But that ban did not extend to groups such as FFTCUK, which
remained on the site with more than 10,000 members. Joe Ondrak, of the
factchecking site Logically, says the group’s denials don’t hold water.
He cites the fact that members of the group openly talk about
“adrenochrome harvesting” – the supposed high from drinking children’s
blood. “While they don’t talk about Trump saving the world, the bedrock
of their particular movement is based on one of QAnon’s many plotlines,
rather than having any basis in reality,” Ondrak says.
Shortly before this piece was published, Facebook finally took action
to remove FFTCUK “for violating our dangerous individuals and
organisations policy”. A spokesperson said: “In August, we expanded our
dangerous individuals and organisations policy to address militarised
social movements and violence-inducing conspiracy networks, such as
QAnon. Since then, we’ve identified over 600 militarised social
movements, removing about 2,400 pages, 14,200 groups and about 1,300
Instagram accounts they maintained, and in addition, we’ve removed about
1,700 pages, 5,600 groups and about 18,700 Instagram accounts
representing QAnon.”
The problem for Facebook is that the QAnon rabbit hole doesn’t work
like other conspiracy theories. Rather than laying out the conspiracy,
with a call to arms for believers, it instead offers a far more
compelling instruction: “Do your research.”
Adrian Hon, a game designer and founder of the developer Six to
Start, describes the appeal as similar to that of an “alternate reality
game”, or ARG.A relatively niche pursuit even in the
geek circles where they flourish, ARGs can be thought of as large-scale
communal puzzles, with clues and riddles often seeded across fake
websites and real locations. They often involve the players working
together to assemble evidence of a shadowy conspiracy, at a scale that
no one person could hope to solve alone. The parallels, he feels, are
obvious. “QAnon makes the act of ‘researching’ fun, and into a game. It
is not a solitary effort where you are in your basement putting red
string everywhere, and no one cares what you’re doing: you’re doing this
in forums, on Facebook and WhatsApp. It is quite a social phenomenon.”
QAnon
is a group with coherent goals – ending child trafficking, or opposing
Covid lockdowns – that prompt further questions. The adherents work
together to uncover the truth beneath the surface, moving from
mainstream sites to ever more esoteric communities, slowly getting
sucked into the narrative they are both consuming and, ultimately,
creating. “I know how people feel when they get into this,” Hon says.
“It’s intoxicating and exciting to have all this information at your
fingertips, and to be Googling things and checking websites.”
That impulse doesn’t just pull in adherents. Those on the outside can
find themselves equally intrigued by the complexity of QAnon-related
beliefs. Abbie Richards, a graduate student of climate studies at
Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands, found herself
the target of QAnon-related attacks after she went viral on TikTok for,
of all things, a video criticising golf courses.
“You see all the comments in your videos, and I had one that was
like: ‘Watch Fall of the Cabal, all 24 sections, and it’ll make sense,’”
she says. “I was like, ‘You know what, I will!’” As she researched,
what stood out was the ease with which the movement slid from things
that were absolutely real to things that weren’t. In the eyes of the
QAnon follower: “If Jeffrey Epstein’s death looks suspicious, then how
can you deny that there’s a sex trafficking ring of people who drink
blood?”
Richards drew up a diagram, The Conspiracy Chart, exploring that
slide in detail. At the bottom are things that actually happened –
historical conspiracies such as the FBI’s Cointelpro operation, which
aimed to destroy the civil rights movement in the 1960s. At the top,
past “the antisemitic point of no return”, is the mesh of beliefs that
characterise QAnon and its adherents. Initially posted on TikTok, the
framework is a remarkably useful way of distinguishing between
conspiracy theories, and the alternative realities that sit on top of
them. (“God bless Abbie Richards,” says Full Fact’s Phillips,
unprompted, when discussing the difficulty of defining QAnon.)
But the chart also highlights, inadvertently, the difficulty of
fighting the delusions head-on. As the conspiracies drift further away
from the baseline of reality, the theorists are increasingly living in
an altogether different world.
In the sci-fi author Neal Stephenson’s 2019 novel Fall;
or, Dodge in Hell, a tech guru launches a misinformation attack on the
world, releasing a fake video showing the destruction by a nuclear
weapon of the small Utah town of Moab. The attack is quickly revealed as
a hoax, but it doesn’t matter: 20 years later, “remember Moab” bumper
stickers plaster cars as a cold civil war simmers. The consensus reality
has broken down. Stephenson’s book feels prescient in an age when QAnon
is mobilising marches of thousands of people against mass child
abductions that aid workers say have simply not taken place. And,
surprisingly, some experts, such as Ruth Ahnert, a professor at Queen
Mary University of London and fellow of the Alan Turing Institute, which
conducts research into artificial intelligence and data science, think
we have been here before.
Ahnert
acknowledges that Facebook and other social media platforms have
changed the way we get information, but disputes that consensus reality
is only now breaking down. “I think that idea is true only if you think
of the movement from the 20th century to the 21st century, from
broadcast media to social media. If you look in the longer history –
back to the 16th century – you see something that looks like now.”
She says that then, as now, the elites had access to fairly accurate
information about the state of the world. “If you look at the really
influential people, those people had huge reach. They were communicating
across Europe, into north Africa, into South America, Ottoman empire,
sub-Saharan Africa.” Think of Samuel Pepys, as administrator of the
navy, able to request and receive a report on the local conditions from
almost anywhere English ships sailed. “But normal people were probably
not communicating much beyond their village,” Ahnert points out. And, in
an era when people primarily get their news from social networks – as
more than one in 10 British adults do, according to Ofcom – then all that has happened is the village has moved online.
In that long view, the artificial world isn’t the one the internet
and lockdown have created, but the temporary “blip” in time when
broadcast media was able to forge one shared reality for a nation. “I
wonder if it’s kind of come full circle in a way,” Ahnert says. “The
more information we have access to, the less ability we have to tell
what is authentic or not.”
When I put Ahnert’s words to Facebook’s chief product officer, Chris
Cox, he is, unsurprisingly, less pessimistic. “I don’t think we’re going
back to the stone age here, but I do think, like with each medium, we
go through a reckoning when it’s born; [a process] of understanding it
and integrating it into our lives. Facebook was built in 2004, so I
guess technically we’re still a teenager.”
He points out that for Facebook, the work is continuing. “When we
study groups, for example, we are able to study which of those are
harmful and take a stand on them. And which of those are creating, at
least at the individual level, a sense of deep belonging, fulfilling a
deep need.”
We aren’t fully living in an online village yet. The number of people
who get their news from a large, trusted provider still vastly
outweighs those who focus primarily on social media; three times as many
British people say BBC One is their single most important news source
as those who cite Facebook. But Facebook is in third place, just behind
ITV, and its share is growing.
“We take our responsibility very, very seriously,” says Facebook’s
Mendelsohn. “It’s interesting to think about the history of
misinformation, because it has been around for ever. It is in the nature
of human beings.”
Rachel has a more concrete suggestion for how to reverse the tide.
“QAnon seems to turn people into angry, bitter, volatile people.
Offering kindness, and reminding yourself of who they really are, helps.
It is a mental health issue.”
When
she confronted her husband about the Hanks video, and started making
preparations to leave, it shocked him back to reality. Philip came to
her, saying he had deleted everything QAnon-relatedfrom his phone, as well as his social media accounts. “I do love you,” he said.
It has been a long road to recovery. Philip admitted that he hadn’t
seen the Hanks video, but a still image that was “definitely him”. Two
days later, he and Rachel went shopping, and he wore a face covering for
the first time, something he had previously insisted was just another
example of how “they” were controlling the “sheep”. Since then, Rachel
says, “we’ve racked up more than 1,000 miles in the car, driving all
over England to visit beautiful, quiet places to walk and talked like
there is no tomorrow.
“I reminded him of how we laughed like drains when Trump was elected
in 2016 and wondered if the US had lost its collective mind. He laughed
and agreed. He still believes there might be a deep state or something
sinister like that, but is now thinking more about questioning the
motives of the people who are doing the pointing – not who they are
pointing at.
“I am glad I stuck my hand down the rabbit hole and hauled him out,”
she says. “Although I suspect that I am going to be dusting the rabbit
droppings off him for a long time.”
Hello everyone, my name is Alfreed siang i am here to say a big thank you to my doctor DR OLU who helped me enlarge my penis.i have never had a happy relationship in my life because of my inability to perform well due to my small penis, due to frustration,i went online in search of solution to ending my predicament and than i came across testimony on how DR OLU has helped them, so i contacted him and he promised to help me with penis enlargement,i doubted at first but i gave him a trial and he sent me the product which i used according to his prescription and in less than a week,i saw changes in my penis and it grow to the size i wanted and since then,i am now a happy man and no lady complains again about my penis.if you also need the services of my doctor,you can also contact him on his email.. drolusolutionhome@gmail.com or his whataspp is +2348140654426
As a Partner and Co-Founder of Predictiv and PredictivAsia, Jon specializes in management performance and organizational effectiveness for both domestic and international clients. He is an editor and author whose works include Invisible Advantage: How Intangilbles are Driving Business Performance. Learn more...
1 comments:
Hello everyone, my name is Alfreed siang i am here to say a big thank you to my doctor DR OLU who helped me enlarge my penis.i have never had a happy relationship in my life because of my inability to perform well due to my small penis, due to frustration,i went online in search of solution to ending my predicament and than i came across testimony on how DR OLU has helped them, so i contacted him and he promised to help me with penis enlargement,i doubted at first but i gave him a trial and he sent me the product which i used according to his prescription and in less than a week,i saw changes in my penis and it grow to the size i wanted and since then,i am now a happy man and no lady complains again about my penis.if you also need the services of my doctor,you can also contact him on his email.. drolusolutionhome@gmail.com or his whataspp is +2348140654426
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