#ImWithHer #VoteClintonKaineThe Hillary Clinton Conspiracy Theories the Better Ones:Did You Hear the Latest About Hillary? by Zeynep Tufekci ( reppubliedhed with permission of the author and NYTimes )

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

Hillary powers through pneumonia — because that’s what women do.Why is it surprising that the presidential candidate kept working even while ill? Women do it every day

Hillary powers through pneumonia — because that’s what women do.Why is it surprising that the presidential candidate kept working even while ill? Women do it every day
Hillary Clinton waves after leaving an apartment building Sunday, Sept. 11, 2016, in New York. (Credit: AP/Andrew Harnik)

As the cover of nearly every newspaper and news site in America made abundantly clear Monday morning, Hillary Clinton, the Democratic candidate for president of the United States, cut short her appearance at 9/11 memorial ceremony on Sunday and later disclosed that she’d been diagnosed on Friday with pneumonia. In a more normal world and in a more normal year, that information might receive a public round of supportive get well wishes, and then we’d move on. But these, as we are painfully aware, are not normal times.

Clinton’s health has been a front and center topic of public speculation and armchair diagnoses for several months now, all couched in the vague concern about whether this woman — this woman with actual political experience and knowledge — is less qualified to run the country than her Twitter-troll reality-show-star opponent. It’s a popular old ploy: Ladies, aren’t you too weak to do this stuff? Why don’t you just sit down and have a lemonade and leave the heavy lifting of running the world to the menfolk, dear? To which I say: You have got to be kidding me.

Powering through is what women do. Last month, Chinese Olympic swimmer Fu Yuanhui managed to shock the world by admitting that she’d had her period and had been feeling “a bit weak and really tired” during a medley relay. It was as if the reality that most of the 12- to 55-year-old female population of the planet still manages to get stuff done every single month was a revelation.

Three years ago, Jennifer Lawrence was diagnosed with pneumonia at the height of awards season, and though she scaled back some on her public appearances, she still managed to show up looking stellar in time to pick up her “Silver Linings Playbook” Oscar. Tony Award winner Kristin Chenoweth has asthma — even if you might not have been able to tell from the lung power she exerts in her tireless stage and TV work.

Oh, and Olympian and skating star Kristi Yamaguchi has asthma, too. And earlier this year, Lena Dunham shared a candid Facebook post about her endometriosis and her need to take a brief beat to rest, while acknowledging, “So many women with this disease literally don’t have the option of time off and I won’t take it for granted.”

That’s a hugely important distinction. I don’t know any woman who hasn’t shown up for work through injuries and illnesses, or any mother who doesn’t use her sick days for her children’s illnesses instead of her own. Because I work from home, I have over the past few years kept working through a vile case of chicken pox, multiple bouts of strep throat and two occurrences of cancer, taking time off only for surgery and treatment days. There was a lengthy period in there when I worked with someone who still expected me to reply to emails and answer questions on those hospital days. That’s just what’s expected of women in the workforce, so that’s what gets done.















Let it be noted that while Donald Trump got out of military service because he had bone spurs in his heels, for a woman to acknowledge illness or an existing condition or the routine rhythms of the female reproductive system often has serious negative career consequences. We fear being viewed as weak, so we hustle through the job, hiding or downplaying our diagnoses and hoping nobody notices.
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Can you blame the Clinton campaign, which has been under absurd scrutiny for every head turn, every cough, for initially keeping Hillary’s illness quiet? Could the Clinton team not know that if you’re looking for an argument that someone is unfit for a job, having a treatable and temporary illness sure seems more credible than “is actually an ignorant, incompetent bigot but at least has a penis,” right?

Yet Hillary’s stamina, as anyone who’s watched her over the past few decades should know, is a force to be reckoned with. And as writer Liz Meriwether pointed out Sunday, “If anything, the fact that she was campaigning with pneumonia proves that she’s tough as balls.”