CONSPIRACY THEORIES CAN KILL

Analyst Martin Muno has warned that conspiracy theories are not a joke, “this isn’t just a strange, laughable phenomenon—it’s dangerous to democracy.”

Speaking with Deutsche Welle, Muno said in German that “more and more people seem ready to believe theories that not so long ago would have been dismissed as sheer nonsense.”

He added: “If, just a few years ago, someone had stated in public that a global elite was kidnapping children and torturing them to harvest their blood to make an elixir of youth, they would have been directed to the nearest psychiatric ward. Yet, according to a British poll, some 10% of US citizens say they believe in at least some elements of this absurd theory known as QAnon.”

The conspiracy theory has also been doing the rounds in Germany and, according to the Amadeu Antonio Foundation, which sets out to combat far-right ideologies and racism, it has already attracted some 150,000 supporters.

This makes the German QAnon community the largest outside of the English-speaking realm. A Konrad Adenauer Foundation study conducted from October 2019 to February 2020 found that around a third of Germans were open to conspiracy theories.

Not counting children under 14, that's 24 million people.

Other polls support this figure, and have found many links between QAnon supporters, COVID-19 deniers and right-wing extremists.

How can such blatant nonsense resonate in an enlightened world? After all, this is the 21st century, not the Middle Ages.

The answer is: It's just all a mouse click away. Social networks are the perfect breeding ground for fake news and conspiracy theories.

A study conducted in Germany by Correctiv, which describes itself as a nonprofit investigative newsroom, concluded that Facebook and YouTube were the platforms on which the most false information was spread, with messaging services such as Telegram and WhatsApp not far behind.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that it took six times longer to reach 1,500 people with real news than with fake news.

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