Story of Self

Zoe Holtz

Writing 153A

Misinformation and Conspiracies: An Ongoing Story of Self

Different Pages of Reality

It’s a night like many other nights, my mom is on her second glass of wine, or maybe it’s her third? Either way, she won’t tell you how many she’s had if you ask and asking just puts a tight frown on her face. She tries to ‘educate’ anyone who stays at the dinner table long enough about what’s really going on in the world. About how the covid vaccine is poisonous. How people are dropping dead and ‘we’ll all see eventually’ because ‘they can’t hide this forever’. They, of course, refer to the shadowy Cabal, a group of elites who work in lockstep to achieve their selfish and nefarious goals. She knows all of this through her ‘research’ on random corners of the internet, on youtube and on The Great Awakening forum. She’s done more ‘research’ than any of us could in a lifetime.

The reality she paints for us feels more like something I would watch on TV or see in a comic book, but I try to keep that point to myself. Most nights I simply tell her that’s interesting or ask a few pointed questions to try to unravel her narrative a bit. Some nights I buckle down and get ready for a serious conversation where we dig into her claims, usually with my dad helping as well, to try to get us all on the same page of reality.

One night in particular stands out to me, to show how difficult progress is. This night she was in the living room, again with her heavy glass of wine, and trying to tell me about spike proteins. A Japanese study apparently showed that spike proteins were found in the brain and in the uterus. I couldn’t really tell which thing she thought would be worse, if I were infertile or dead from the vaccine. She told me about how the MRNA vaccine makes the body continuously produce spike proteins, to the point of shedding them or causing horrible health effects. The final straw for me, because I normally try not to engage with her when she has had too much to drink, was when she said “it’s crazy how they are giving people a vax that sends more spike proteins into their body than actual covid.” So I explained and explained and explained and explained. I answered all her questions, even when they had a ‘gotcha’ tone. When finally I realized why we weren’t getting on to the same page. I had made too many assumptions about her scientific understanding and asked her how a protein is even made by a cell. She couldn’t answer. She didn’t know how or if the body regularly deconstructs proteins and RNA. I thought I had made progress with her, that the hours and googling had been worth it because we finally seemed to both understand the vaccine.

The next day I overheard her asking my dad, with a rhetorical tone, how the vaccine could even know to stop making spike proteins. It’s a process, I guess.

Understanding Misinformation and Conspiracy Theorists

The situation with my mom is ongoing, but it has inspired me to seek understanding of how misinformation permeates our world and how some individuals fall completely into it, in the form of conspiracy theories. Writing 107G gave me the opportunity to dive deeply into misinformation in an academic context. I learned about disinformation, misinformation and malinformation, among many other concepts surrounding how and why misinformation has become so prevalent. Echo chambers and algorithms easily put individuals in places that confirm their biases, like how you click on a Ben Shapiro video and your recommendations from youtube calibrate based on that. For a proposed solution, I found a news site called All Sides which presented two tellings of the same news story from the left and right perspectives. My mom thought it was interesting, but even she thought their conservative sources were centrist rather than actually conservative. It didn’t take with her, and I understand why. She likes putting the clues together that fit her larger puzzle. She doesn’t delve too deeply into any particular thing to extensively fact check it or see what opposing opinion would be and why. When a piece of information is debunked, she doesn’t particularly care because she’s drawing on ‘so much evidence’ from ‘so many different sources’. I think this is what separates the truth seekers from the LARPers, when something is breaking your worldview, you find out why it’s the exception and you search for a new big picture that makes sense of everything.

Making A Difference

I want to help other families and people going through similar situations. A support group on reddit called r/QAnoncasualties was helpful but hit too close to home at times. People are going through the exact same thing and it’s breaking families apart and marriages. People lose their jobs. People dig their heels in as the consequences to their ‘truth’ ripple through their lives and relationships. It’s such a tough problem, because if what my mom was talking about were right, I’d be on the same page as her. I’d avoid the vaccine if it were poisonous. I’d protest a government that steals elections.

In fact, I do agree with her that elites in this country have turned the tides in their favor for a long time. I think our political system and government needs change. I don’t think there is a devil worshiping elite working in tandem to depopulate and control the world, while a few ‘white hats’ work against them.

These people are vulnerable and isolating themselves while eating up lies that have serious consequences for themselves, for the ones close to them and for this country. And I am still searching for an answer. If I can help my mom, then I can share my story with others and help others.

As of now, I have a few ideas to help her. If I can get her interested in other hobbies and spend more time with her, she can spend less time absorbing conspiracy theorist media. The echo chamber is probably the most harmful component to all of this. I can educate her on non controversial things, like how proteins are made and how a vaccine works, so that she can more easily sniff out suspicious claims. I can show compassion and empathy for her situation. I can give her time. After all, how long can someone think their conspiracies are just about to be confirmed while the only news that comes out does the opposite of supporting her world view? I wish I had a better and quicker plan, but this is a learning process for everyone.