Ian Fantom – June 18, 2020

According to this morning’s BBC Radio 4 news programme King’s College London had had a paper published in the journal Psychological Medicine about social media and ‘conspiracy theories’. I looked up the BBC’s website and found an article ‘Coronavirus: Social media users more likely to believe conspiracies‘. I checked with the author, Rory Cellan-Jones, who kindly gave me the links. The paper was actually published nine days earlier, and so I had thought there must have been a later paper, but King’s College had put out a compilation of the findings that very morning, presumably for the press, under the heading ‘Covid conspiracies and confusions: the impact on compliance with the UK’s lockdown rules and the link with social media use’.

Definitional Confusion

I have no reason to doubt the statistics of their sociological survey, but there does seem to be confusion over the use of ‘conspiracies’ and related terms in their own paper. The abstract begins:

“Social media platforms have long been recognised as major disseminators of health misinformation. Many previous studies have found a negative association between health-protective behaviours and belief in the specific form of misinformation popularly known as ‘conspiracy theory’. Concerns have arisen regarding the spread of COVID-19 conspiracy theories on social media”. So here they are using the term ‘conspiracy theory’ specifically as a form of ‘misinformation’, rather than a belief in a conspiracy. The abstract concludes: “When used as an information source, unregulated social media may present a health risk that is partly but not wholly reducible to their role as disseminators of health-related conspiracy beliefs”. A cursory glance will show that the heading and the conclusion are about ‘conspiracy beliefs’, so where does ‘conspiracy theory’ come in?

I looked up the full paper, which was headed ‘Health-protective behaviour, social media usage and conspiracy belief during the COVID-19 public health emergency’. The first paragraph of the Introduction appears to define the ‘conspiracy’ terms, but it doesn’t; it throws the definitions into further confusion:

Conspiracism is the tendency to assume that major public events are secretly orchestrated by powerful and malevolent entities acting in concert (Douglas et al.,2019). The idea that such plotting explains social reality was influentially termed ‘the conspiracy theory of society’ by Popper (1969), and what Hofstadter termed ‘conspiratorial fantasies’ (1964) are now popularly referred to as ‘conspiracy theories’. Here, the more neutral ‘conspiracy beliefs’ is preferred. Online, such beliefs are now frequently offered as explanations of Coronavirus Disease 2019, or COVID-19. This outbreak of conspiracism is only the latest wave in an ongoing ‘deluge of conflicting information, misinformation and manipulated information on social media’ which some researchers have long argued ‘should be recognised as a global public-health threat’ (Larson,2018, p. 309).

So, here we have a concoction of terms which, the authors are suggesting all mean the same thing, though they don’t explicitly say so. They throw into various definitions the ideas of ‘a tendency to assume’, and ‘fantasies’, ‘deluge of conflicting information’, ‘ misinformation’, and ‘manipulated information’, in addition to a belief in a form of ‘misinformation’, as indicated in the abstract, and link it all to ‘social media’. But when they say they prefer “the more neutral ‘conspiracy beliefs’” they are admitting that all the other terms are derogatory terms. Such terms should not be used in any scientific paper. Yet by defining ‘conspiracy beliefs’ to equate with the derogatory terms makes ‘conspiracy beliefs’ in this context a derogatory term, too.

The absurdity of this lies in the fact that the official theory of 9/11, that it was conducted by 19 Muslim Semites under the leadership of Osama bin Laden, is not regarded as a ‘conspiracy theory’, yet questioning that version is regarded as ‘conspiracy theory’. If the authors of this paper are genuinely writing about conspiracy beliefs, then why don’t they just define what they mean, without reference to derogatory terms, which should never be used in any scientific paper, other than to examine language usage, or to explain why they should never be used in scientific writing. I think the obfuscation in this paragraph is an example of the manipulation of information that they are accusing others of.

The Facts Don’t Matter

The second paragraph states (with references removed):

Multiple studies have found a link between medical conspiracy beliefs and reluctance to engage in health-protective behaviours with regard to vaccination or safer sex. This raises the possibility that the circulation of COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs might be associated with similar risks. Indeed, two recent studies have found a negative relationship between COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs and health-protective behaviours intended to help control the COVID-19 pandemic.

I haven’t waded through the references to check on this, but I have seen enough of the papers by psychologists on ‘belief in conspiracy theories’ not to expect any of them to actually analyse the basis of people’s disbelief in what they are being told by authority. The facts of the issues in question don’t seem to matter.

The third paragraph begins: “In the UK, broadcast and print media are regulated (albeit by different mechanisms), while social media are unregulated”. Yes, it’s called ‘free speech’. The mainstream media are indeed regulated, and that is the problem. Views that the regulators disapprove of are called ‘conspiracy theories’, and ‘conspiracy theorists’ are rapidly removed. As Nigel Farage said recently, “I have never seen so many people scared to say what they think”. “What is at stake now is the very essence of free speech”, he said in another interview on 16 June.

Offcom: ‘Don’t worry your pretty little head’

“For example”, that paragraph continues, “when COVID-19 misinformation was propagated by David Icke and Brian Rose on the London Live television station, the owner of the station was sanctioned by the UK broadcasting regulator for disseminating content which ‘had the potential to cause significant harm to viewers’ (Ofcom,2020, p. 16)”. Nowhere in Offcom’s statement on this issue did they raise the question of what David Icke had said was true or untrue. Fundamentally, David Icke was contesting statements put out by the government, and was giving what he believed to be the bigger picture, a view he had been putting about for 30 years before the CoronaVirus issue emerged. The interviewer, Brian Rose, took a more pro-government line. The response, as given in a three-page description in the Offcom report, included:

The Licensee considered the programme to be an exploration of David Icke’s theories about the origins of the virus and the responses of governments, views which it stated David Icke has the right to hold and express. … It added that viewers of London Live, who are not “especially vulnerable” and are capable of “independent and critical” thought would be “familiar” with David Icke’s views.

ESTV said that Brian Rose’s opening statement contextualised some of David Icke’s “more extreme” views, and referred to Brian Rose as a “reputable”, “experienced” and “professional” interviewer. The Licensee stated that the interviewer challenged David Icke at “several points” in a “discursive” but “non-combative style” comparable to “Louis Theroux”, and corrected David Icke on potentially harmful views, such as on the comparative infection rates and risks of Coronavirus and flu and the effectiveness of vaccines. It added that it was clear Brian Rose was “sceptical” about his views, and that the close of the interview in which Brian Rose expressed his admiration for David Icke despite disagreeing with him on “several” matters, and David Icke emphasised the importance of being “unique” and open-minded, highlighted that no harm was caused to viewers.

So should it be the government’s job to decide what is ‘potentially harmful’ to the public, rather than what is truthful? What happens when learning the truth is considered ‘potentially harmful’? Is Offcom’s attituted of ‘don’t worry your pretty little head’ acceptable in a democracy? Offcom had previously sent out a ‘Note to Broadcasters’ concerning CoronaVirus, which also did not raise the issue of whether or not the broadcasts were truthful, but only raised a concern of ‘potentially harmful’ material. Nor did it specify to whom the material may be ‘potentially harmful’. I’ve met that trick before: to the public it will mean ‘potentially harmful to the public’, and to the government it may well mean ‘potentially harmful to the government’.

Blinding with science and the blindingly obvious

So what does this King’s College paper boil down to? I think a fair encapsulation would be: “Psychologists at King’s College London have discovered that people who disbelieve what they are being told with respect to COVID-19 are less likely to follow government guidelines than those who do”. What an astounding discovery! But should it have reached the BBC’s national morning news? This research was part-funded by Public Health England, presumably out of tax-payers’ money.

I see in this strong similarities with a paper I reviewed in May by psychologists Viren Swami of Anglia Ruskin University and David Barron of Perdana University in Malaysia, titled ‘‘Analytic Thinking, Rejection of Coronavirus (COVID-19) Conspiracy Theories, and Compliance with Mandated Social-Distancing: Direct and Indirect Relationships in a Nationally Representative Sample of Adults in the United Kingdom. I called my article ‘ “Fake Psychology”: Health dangers of COVID-19 ‘Conspiracy Theories’ claim’. In that article I wrote of that paper:

The essence of their research boils down to showing that people who do not believe the need for social distancing or self-isolation are less likely to follow mandated social-distancing measures than those who do. This is intuitive and obvious, but their conclusions are obscured by woolly concepts such as ‘conspiracy theories’, which is neither defined, nor used consistently.

I still hold to that. The final paragraph in that article ran:

I have put special effort into analysing this one paper, because it seems to be part of a network of papers produced by professors of psychology who specialise in denigrating ‘conspiracy theories’, and much of what applies to that paper will apply to some extent or other to the network as a whole. The obvious influence of fake science on this global lockdown, or partial lockdown, is now so evident that universities need to be held to account. The status of universities and of university professors as purveyors of the truth in the public mind is high. What I am seeing in such ‘ad hominem’ abuse of people who speak out against authority is an abuse of trust. Ultimately, the reputations of universities and of professional institutes in the areas of psychology and related disciplines is at risk, unless quality control is tightened up, and rogue professors weeded out.

I was disappointed to see King’s College London participating in such a cabal. I’m sure they do lot’s of good research, but just one rogue department can pull down the reputation of the whole university. The same applies to the profession of psychology as a whole. I’m sure there are reputable psychologists, though I suspect that good psychological councillors arise through their own sensitivities rather than through academic courses. Surely psychologists as a whole must be aware of the abuse of psychology for government propaganda. The journal Psychological Medicine is supposed to be peer reviewed. If I were its editor I would be giving whoever peer reviewed the King’s College paper a severe reprimand. And if any reader knows of a school leaver who is thinking of studying psychology at university, they could perhaps make them aware of the sort of people they could be studying under. A quick search for the universities they have in mind, together with the term ‘conspiracy theory’ should give them a quick guide as to which universities to avoid. If a university professor intentionally issues fake academic papers, then one should be asking what his role really is. If he’s putting it about that there’s a whole lot of paranoid people out there with a tendency to assume that there’s a deep state conspiracy against them, as distinct to a whole lot of individuals out there who have become sceptical of what they are being told by governments and the mass media, then one should be cautious. A lot of political propaganda works by ‘reversal’ – that is, accusing others of what they are guilty of themselves.