By representing itself both as an open platform and as a company with progressive values, Twitter has put itself into an awkward in-between spot and is bound to create such controversies.
We live in a world where a substantial number of people believe the earth is flat, that 5G cellular is a mind control scheme, that vaccines cause autism, that COVID-19 was created by a political party, that the concept of climate change is manufactured, or that major national crises are actually just actors being paid to further a political narrative.
Most of these ideas aren't new, but in decades past you might have heard about them from a conspiracy-therorist neighbor, a low profile website, or an alternative magazine with little reputation of its own.
Now, these ideas are spread on the exact same platforms as objectively truthful / scientifically sound media. Your Youtube conspiracy theory channel is right next to the BBC's videos. Your viral Facebook post could be from the New York Times, or it might be from a propaganda organization - or worse, an account that looks like a normal person but which was specifically created to spread misinformation that seems plausibly truthful.
Credibility is distributed and anyone can publish to a huge audience, which is wonderful sometimes, and othertimes deeply problematic, because the viewer often doesn't know enough to distinguish fact from fiction and can't trust the publisher at face value anymore.
Its uncharted territory. The cost to distribute is zero, and ideas spread far and wide - but that means that there are equally as many incredible sources on any given topic as credible ones, and telling the difference is hard, and sometimes not knowing the difference is dangerous. Dunning-Kruger writ large.
> Most of these ideas aren't new, but in decades past you might have heard about them from a conspiracy-therorist neighbor, a low profile website, or an alternative magazine with little reputation of its own.
> Now, these ideas are spread on the exact same platforms as objectively truthful / scientifically sound media. Your Youtube conspiracy theory channel is right next to the BBC's videos. Your viral Facebook post could be from the New York Times, or it might be from a propaganda organization - or worse, an account that looks like a normal person but which was specifically created to spread misinformation that seems plausibly truthful.
My intuition tells me that knowledge of conspiracy theories is now mostly (in terms of awareness) spread through mainstream media articles asserting that "conspiracy theorists believe <x>". Now I don't spend all that much time in that corner of the internet, but I spend enough time in /r/conspiracy that I have a half decent feel for what the general consensus is on the topics covered in the media, and the way the media describes the "beliefs" of "conspiracy theorists" is incredibly untrue, at least as far as /r/conspiracy goes.
Think about it: do you think all the reporters that write on such topics, and in turn all the people in forums like Reddit and HN, actually know what they're talking about? Or might it be more likely that heuristics in their subconscious mind are feeding information up to the subconscious, that was not once fact-checked?
Pay attention when reading the news or forum comments, observe for yourself how many people speak as if they know things that are literally unknowable, such as events in the future, or the contents of another person's mind. Go through each comment in this very thread and see how many you can count.
There is something very interesting going on, at scale.