I’ve noticed an interesting trend on Facebook. I’ve noticed numerous antivaxxers are really into conspiracy theories. They spend their time endlessly posting about crazy nonsense Like Flat Earth, 9/11 was a hoax, Illuminat, etc.
They never post about family, friends, their education, their profession, career or job.
Why is that?
One of the lead conspiracy theorists just got his phone yanked and is whining about it. Check out this Twitter thread about it, it's the funniest thing I've read in a while ...
https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1569847934849634306
Edit: Several lines of my text got removed and the result was gobbledygook, so I erased that post. Has anyone else experienced that, as you type, sometimes whole sentences or paragraphs are removed? WIX can be a pain in the ass.
I am not on Fecesbook, but to avoid the dreaded FB jail, having a friends and family account means they can still be on there when things go south for the conspiracy account. The MAGA and QAnon have several accounts, and yet would insist they are not trolls.
Troll farms are sometimes people behind a desk utilizing broken English to pass on disinfo. You do not need to have many computer skills so the unemployed will often fill the spots happily... whether in the USA, Russia, China, India, and especially poorer countries like Macedonia, Kosovo, Philippines, Albania, Brazil, many African countries and more including Ukraine. A lot of the trolls utilize copy and pasted memes to add disinfo as they are not able to be picked up by the Social media text checkers and mods ignore them...
In the run up to the 2020 elections, it is estimated nearly half of Americans a month were reached by trolls. And in 2022 and 2024 the rich people who want more tax breaks will be paying for even more to do their bidding. https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/16/1035851/facebook-troll-farms-report-us-2020-election/
Fighting fire with fire is one reason I started making memes. (I used to hate seeing them until I understood the power it gave trolls over the minds of voters) It can tell a story simply and very effectively, although others are far better at it. There are troll factories in China where only a few people control an entire warehouse size bots.
To answer your question, I would guess that some conspiracy theorists' Facebook pages are troll accounts. The names and locations could be fake and these accounts may have been created by people in another country and have no other function other than to start false rumors in an attempt to wreak as much havoc as possible.
Conspiracy theories that have no proof are believed by what I call "conspiracy nuts". However, there are some real conspiracies that have existed, and have been exposed and proven. One of the most well-known conspiracies is the Watergate break-in.
Johnson & Johnson knew that their talcum powder caused cancer, and tried to keep their own findings hidden from the public. They leaked out! A conspiracy nut might believe that J&J was conspiring to deliberately kill their customers. That's not what happened; they just didn't care enough about human life to let it cut into their profits. (That's fairly common behavior with big corporations.)
It's also been revealed that the fossil fuel industry was aware decades ago that their products were damaging the environment, and they kept their own studies hidden. They couldn't stay hidden indefinitely.
The tobacco industry hid the truth about the addictive nature of their products, as well as the health risks associated with it. There were also some leaked memos that showed that they knew they had to get teens to start smoking and get hooked early in order to have the long-time customers they craved to keep the money rolling in.
There is also some evidence that the Russian government may have helped Trump win the 2016 election by spreading falsehoods about Hillary Clinton on American social media. Here is the interesting part: There was a REAL conspiracy to rig the election by spreading FALSE conspiracies!
Seriously, one of the best ways to determine whether a conspiracy theory is true or false is to simply look at the evidence. If there's no evidence, it's not true!
I've said this before, but I'll say it again ... I avoid speaking of "conspiracy theories" because that elevates them to the status of theories. They aren't theories--they're narratives, little stories. They're much simpler to understand than actual theories, and that's why so many idiots swear by them. To me, a lot of conspiracy narratives follow the same plots as B-level action flicks--which form the main entertainment diet for a lot of these people. I've known some people who watch so many action flicks that it's a wonder they haven't gone slack-jawed and drooling in front of the screen. Behind all the action, there's often a corrupt, power-hungry government "heavy," backed up by largely lookalike, can't-tell-em-apart members of what would be the equivalent of a "deep state," that the protagonist has to overcome. Multiply by 100 or a 1000 for all the stupid action flicks out there, and you have a world full of idiots for whom such plots are like mother's milk.
Conspiracy narratives are always far more exciting than actual theories. Take COVID-19, for instance. The likely origin is that a virus jumped the species barrier (not something that's very rare in the longer timelines of the natural world), and there are all kinds of scientific literature explaining how that happens. But that's harder to understand, and it doesn't follow an exciting plot line. It's far more thrilling, and easier, to think of the Chinese running a secret military-run bioterror lab and letting the virus out deliberately. The Chinese, meanwhile, have their own conspiracy narratives: one is that a team of US athletes that had visited Wuhan in November 2019 included CIA agents who secretly released their bioterror weapon. Whatever the narrative, though, it's always easier to understand than the bare facts, which rarely pander to anyone's pet conspiracy. The scientific community, at great expense, produces densely-worded papers that most people have difficulty reading or gaining access to; conspiracy narratives can be concocted, disseminated, and read at no cost by idiot doomscrollers while they sit on the can. Guess which wins the popularity contest.
"Champion of Science and Reason" asks why the conspiracy-minded "never post about family, friends, their education, their profession, career or job." Well, that's easy to answer. Most people lead very humdrum workaday lives. They go to work in the morning, put in their time, put up with shit bosses and shit pay, and go home angry and resentful to equally tired spouses and demanding kids. But a conspiracy narrative will give them that little zing! that makes things more interesting, and if they join other like-minded folks in political action, they can become like the protagonist-heroes of their favorite action flicks.