Did You Hear the Latest About Hillary? by Zeynep Tufekci ( republiedhed with permission of the author and NYTimes )
CreditEric Thayer for The New York Times
Hillary Clinton has pneumonia. Did you know she has a body double? She was that blond woman waving at reporters in front of Chelsea Clinton’s apartment a few hours after Mrs. Clinton felt unwell and left the Sept. 11 commemoration at ground zero.
Did you also hear that Mrs. Clinton has Parkinson’s disease? Her coughing fits prove it, as does her latest bout of illness. She has epilepsy, as well as advancing dementia. She has managed to hide all these illnesses through almost a year and a half of a grueling campaign because the man the world thinks is the head of her Secret Service detail is actually her hypnotist. He’s also a medical doctor.
No, I haven’t lost my mind. I’ve just lost many hours on social media, where these conspiracy theories run rampant.
Well before Mrs. Clinton fell ill and had to be assisted into a van on Sunday, former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York, a supporter of Donald J. Trump, said on Fox News that the news media had failed to cover her health and that viewers should “go online and put down ‘Hillary Clinton illness,’ take a look at the videos for yourself.”
The events of last weekend will not help Mrs. Clinton, who spent Monday at home and canceled a trip to California. Nor will they help the rest of us, stuck in this conspiracy election.
Yes, the Clinton campaign should have disclosed her pneumonia diagnosis on Friday, curtailed her schedule and allowed her to recover. Lack of disclosure only increases the number of people who suspect she’s hiding something.
But there’s also no amount of disclosure that would change the minds of people who think she’s been hiding epilepsy, Parkinson’s and dementia, thanks to her secret hypnotist and persuasive body double.
The problem is much bigger than a single moment, or this particular campaign. Conspiracy theories are like mosquitoes that thrive in swamps of low-trust societies, weak institutions, secretive elites and technology that allows theories unanchored from truth to spread rapidly. Swatting them one at a time is mostly futile: The real answer is draining the swamps.
I’m originally from Turkey, so I’m used to my Western friends snickering at the prevalence of conspiracy theories in the Middle East. It is frustrating, but the reason for these theories is not a mystery. Elites do practice excessive secrecy. Foreign powers have meddled in the region for decades. Institutions that are supposed to be trusted intermediaries, separating facts from fiction while also challenging the powerful, are few and weak. It makes sense to gravitate toward explanations that attribute everything to secret cabals.
And now, with social media, what remained of controls on keeping the worst stuff out of the public sphere has been demolished.
Wait, what part of the world was I writing about again?
My coughing fit brought about by my own advanced dementia must have confused me again.
Conspiracy theories have been around a long time, but thanks to new technologies and decline of trust in institutions, it’s getting worse.
First of all: There are actual conspiracies in the world. The powerful do routinely collude to hide information. To add to this, people like stories, and conspiracy theories are a form of storytelling. The trouble here isn’t a healthy suspicion of power, but the transformation of a culture of political distrust into a swirl of bizarre tales divorced from facts.
We expect traditional news outlets to act as gatekeepers for information, helping us distinguish truth from rumor. They’ve never been perfect at this job, but the precarious economics of the industry is making the situation even worse. The new, internet-driven financing model for news outlets is great for spreading conspiracy theories. Each story lives or dies by how much attention it attracts. This rewards the outrageous, which can get clicks more easily.
However, conspiracy theories can live only to the degree they can find communities to flourish in. That’s where social media comes in. Finding a community online has been great for many people — the dissident in Egypt, the gay teenager in a conservative town — but the internet is not Thor’s hammer, which only the purest of heart can pick up. Connecting online also works for an anti-vaccination parent or a Sept. 11 truther. Conspiracists can organize online and can push their version of the world into the mainstream.
To fight conspiracy theories, we also don’t just need more fact-checkers. We need to fix the underlying dynamics.
People think that their governments are working against them, or at least not for them, and in some cases this is true. Ruling elites around the world are circling their wagons, and fueling more suspicion and mistrust. Reversing that would be the best defense against baseless paranoia that masquerades as political action.
The predominant internet business model isn’t always great for democracy, but it’s not the only option. We should support subscription, donation and philanthropy funded sources of information. Once “go viral or die” isn’t the only game in town, and with a more transparent and responsive government, our conspiracy fever might break.
Zeynep Tufekci is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina School of Information and Library Science and a contributing opinion writer.
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A version of this op-ed appears in print on September 13, 2016, on page A27 of the New York edition with the headline: You Hear the Latest on Hillary?. Today's Paper|Subscribe
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