In this age of mis-and dis-information, our tiny shards of fragmented media mean that in addition to no more truly mass hit songs or TV shows, it is also easy to miss actual news if editors on your favored sites choose not to inform you. Unless you seek out multiple news sources, you’re probably stuck in one biased silo or another. If you don’t expand your news horizons, it’s unlikely you’re getting the full story. Maybe you’re only getting a partial look, or maybe it’s a totally slanted look, and that doesn’t even take into account the thought that you’re being exposed to conspiracy theories that are presented in such a way that they seem true, and considering your personal biases (which the platforms have figured out by tracking your browsing), seem very appealing to you.
Taylor Lorenz, the technology reporter at the Washington Post, talks about “engagement farming” in her new book called “Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet.” In it, she relies on that phrase, and when you first hear it, you may know precisely what it means, and think she should win the biggest Kewpie Doll at the state fair for hitting the nail exactly on the head. But if you missed it, I’ll paraphrase the definition here: engagement farming is a strategy used by spammy pages to increase their reach through controversial, often low-quality content.
The practice of using conspiracy theories to explain the world around us is certainly not new. Conspiracy theorizing began innocently enough. In its earliest incarnations, it provided mankind with redoubtable reasoning, explaining away earthquakes, eclipses, volcanoes, and all sorts of at-the-time inexplicable natural phenomena. We are, as a species, uncomfortable with the inexplicable, and so we invent what seem at a time of limited education and understanding, plausible reasons for the things we can’t otherwise explain. Or, as science fiction icon, Arthur C. Clarke (2001: A Space Odyssey”), wrote: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
At some point, we added nefarious reasoning to our innocent speculation. I know there are earlier examples of engagement farming, but one that sticks out like a pair of brown shoes at a black tie formal is the idea that we never went to the moon. We just had “astronauts” swimming around an indoor YMCA pool in Houston. (Watch out for the kid splashing in Lane 1.) That one represents the leap from using superstition to explain things that were out of our experience due to our limited understanding of events, to purposely creating far-fetched explanations of events for political purposes, and/or for undermining eye-witness or scientific explanations to instill doubt and wreak havoc for fun and profit (see Jones, Alex).
Other early examples include the isolationist John Birch Society which fought to keep us from fluoridating our residential water supply on the paranoid and made-up basis that it was a Communist plot to take over the USA. (Yes, watch out for practitioners of modern dental science—you know the expensive Harleys and Porsches are just a Capitalist cover: they’re all Commies).
The “Single Bullet Theory” held that Lee Harvey Oswald couldn’t have acted alone in assassinating President Kennedy (okay, that one might have legs).
Donald Trump rode to political relevance by falsely claiming that Barack Obama was an illegitimate president because he was born in Kenya (he wasn’t, but he did humiliate Trump with a funny and deadly accurate monologue at a White House Correspondents’ Dinner and has subsequently learned that you can’t humiliate a narcissist and not expect retribution).
With the advent of the internet, it became possible—probable, even—that conspiracy theories would take on a life of their own.
A current example of engagement farming is the tragic incident in Baltimore Harbor where the nearly thousand-foot long container ship, Dali, lost power, rammed a main support, and took down the Francis Scott Key Bridge. The conspiracy theorists are having a field day trying on baseless ideas—or farming—in the hope they’ll come up with a crop so delicious in its malevolence that it engages the popular imagination.
CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan reported that in the immediate aftermath of the Key Bridge collapse, conspiracy theories blossomed like madness in the Spring. They laid the blame for the powerless ship taking down the bridge on society-ruining DEI (don’t ask me), Israel and Ukraine (something about the containers’ contents), Obama (again, don’t ask me, he’s just the all-purpose scapegoat, I guess), and Islamic-terrorism (which seems less likely than Russian-terrorism, but that’s just splitting hairs).
And the saddest display of all, the mean-spirited theories that surrounded Catherine, the Princess of Wales, and her absence from public life after her abdominal surgery, but before the disclosure of her cancer diagnosis.
I can’t say it often enough, get out of your silo and expand you news sources.
©2024 Jon Sinton
Well done, brother Jon!
Here's an addendum via CNN:
Total Eclipse of Sanity: Wild conspiracy theories are circulating across the internet ahead of Monday's total solar eclipse. Many of the conspiracy theories are steeped in religious gobbledygook, with some people suggesting that the rapture may occur because the eclipse will pass over seven towns named Nineveh (to be clear, the eclipse will not, in fact, pass over seven towns named Nineveh). The debunked conspiracies appear absurd, but they're amassing millions of views on platforms like TikTok and YouTube. Matt Novak has more here.
At the same time, over in right-wing media, outlets like InfoWars and The Gateway Pundit are exploiting the astronomical phenomenon to fan fears with out-of-context and outrageous stories. "CONVERGENCE: The Solar Eclipse, CERN, Lucifer, The Vatican, And Reptilian Venom Peptides," read one headline on InfoWars Thursday. Another asked, "Are Globalists Using The April 8th Eclipse For An Occult Ritual?" Meanwhile, a poll ran on the Alex Jones-operated site asking about the possibility of a "planned false flag." Rolling Stone's EJ Dickson has more.