“There was never a single moment where I thought, ‘I really need to start looking into this.’” Inside the making of a conspiracy theorist
or @RedIssue, a Twitter account with nearly 60,000 followers dedicated to supporters of Manchester United football club, 2020 began like any other year – sardonically.
As the pandemic engulfed Britain, @RedIssue’s feed initially reflected widespread anger at the government’s dithering. The account criticised the authorities for not cancelling sporting events and for failing to providestaff with protective equipment. Alongside demands for Boris Johnson, the prime minister, to get “mopping hospital floors instead of scratching his balls at Chequers”, @RedIssue mocked “wacko” conspiracy theorists who claimed that covid-19 was a hoax.
As @RedIssue left football behind and devoted itself to exposing what it now termed the “Global Covid Psyop”, many of its followers fought back. Some tried persuasion. “It’s not a conspiracy, it’s a broken system,” argued one. Others appealed to @RedIssue’s heritage. “Totally embarrassing: a mag a lot of people used to love is getting dragged through the mud,” said another. “What happened?” asked a third.
Psychologists have shown that conspiracy theorising arises out of a desire to make sense of the world around us, and this desire. Lockdowns relied upon unprecedented intrusion by the state, and confined millions to long, solitary days sitting in front of a screen. Without the routines that usually anchor us in time and place, many people’s perception of reality was scrambled.
O’Neill doesn’t like to talk about himself. During our many conversations, he nearly always deflected personal questions, insisting that they weren’t relevant to the matter at hand. “People always want a backstory,” he complained to me. “Ultimately, if I’ve got something to say, it stands and falls on its own merits, not on who I am or what I’ve done.” The closest he came to opening up emotionally was when I asked aboutUnited. “I was a pariah, my name was mud,” he recalled quietly.
As spring gave way to summer, O’Neill’s attitude continued to shift: the government’s floundering pandemic policy increasingly appeared not just hapless, but nefarious. “The corruption under this cabal is as blatant and shameless as in any Banana Republic,” he tweeted in May 2020.
“Then you begin to read, and follow the links, and check the sources, and you start to see it. You start to see that something’s wrong” Modern conspiracy theories place an emphasis on bricolage and amateur inquiry, an approach well-suited to our times. Adherents believe the internet is littered with breadcrumbs that will ultimately lead to the truth. This gamification of everyday life is seductive, offering an individual both the thrill of the chase and a noble sense of collective endeavour. The diffuse nature of the new conspiracism also fortifies it against refutation.
There is a commercial imperative behind algorithms that send users down rabbit holes of increasingly extreme content. Harvesting data to sell targeted advertising requires users of social media to keep clicking, liking and sharing. The best way to keep them engaged is by encouraging them to delve ever deeper into a topic.
Soon after the about-turn, O’Neill sent me an article from a blog called “In This Together”’, which argued that fact-checkers are “no better informed than anyone else [and] are being used by the internet giants, at the behest of government, to censor what we can say online”. This cuts to the heart of the problem with allowing private companies like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to serve as the ultimate moderators of public debate. Some think that they give oxygen to conspiracy theories.
During the boom years, politicians of different stripes offered little justification to the people who experienced dispossession rather than progress. “Settled, stable communities are the enemies of innovation, talent, creativity, diversity and experimentation,” declared Charles Leadbeater, a Labour adviser in the early 2000s; in 2005 Boris Johnson insisted that allowing the sale of Manchester United to the Glazers was “basic Conservative philosophy”.
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