Conspiracy Theories

18 months ago the existence of QAnon was barely mentioned outside a close circle of disinformation reporters. The group relentlessly pushes a baseless circle of conspiracy theories which broadly claim that an international pedophile group is conspiring to steal the U.S. election and usher in an era of overbearing government powers and restrictions on individual rights. Now QAnon is one of the important themes of the closing days of the US Presidential election, not least since the President failed to disavow it in a televised Town Hall last week. The U.S.' major tech platforms have also come lately to the realization that the proliferation of QAnon material poses a significant threat to the integrity of U.S. democracy, and since the Summer, have begun to block some of the most common messages and hashtags on their platforms. In their analysis of the problem, the BBC's disinformation reporters have established that proxy hashtags like #SaveOurChildren and #SaveTHeCHildren  were used a total of 1.5 million times on Twitter and generated more than 28 million interactions on public Facebook and Instagram posts. 

So what does this mean for audiences both here in the UK and around the world? Last week the Washington Post published its own heartbreaking report of how QAnon conspiracies were tearing apart American families as parents and children divided over the baseless conspiracy theories, and spin-off arguments as to why the 'mainstream media' were failing to investigate and report them. Our own disinformation team at BBC Monitoring found a similar picture starting to build here in the UK – where potent conspiracy theories about pedophile rings have circulated for years, but often when investigated have led to misguided police activity which undermined public trust in law enforcement, most recently where UK police were forced to concede that a lengthy investigation into a number of public figures had been based on the fantasies of a liar.

The activities of QAnon – and other similar conspiracy groups - pose a difficult question for public broadcasters. On one hand we see it as a key part of our mission to call out dangerous disinformation where we see it, particularly where falsehood are circulating at a global scale in a way that undermines democracy. On the other hand we risk simply amplifying misinformation by repeating it – even when we make it abundantly clear it’s untrue – and further the mere fact that the 'MSM' disavows QAnon is of course held up by its supporters as further evidence that the stories are true, and that public media are colluding with other shadowy figures in suppressing it.

Our present global struggle with the COVID-19 virus provides further opportunity for bad actors to erode trust in public media. In the UK the concentric conspiracy theories about secretive global cadres, QAnon and public vaccination have been brought together by a colorful cast of characters including David Icke, a conspiracy theorist who first rose to prominence in the UK as a sports reporter, before unexpectedly taking to the airwaves on primetime BBC1 to proclaim that he was in fact the son of God. Icke’s claims are all demonstrably untrue and deserve no public exposure – and yet here in the UK a mainstream terrestrial TV channel under the full glare of our media regulator broadcast a lengthy interview program giving a platform for his views. Little wonder then that the first QAnon demonstrations in the UK managed to attract several hundred protesters, with an increasingly vocal cohort of online supporters. 

The elision of longstanding conspiracy theories with an emerging theme of COVID-disinformation is a particularly worrying development, and it poses the same editorial challenges for broadcasters. This week the Times newspaper in London published a report setting out how Russian social media bots were amplifying an anti-vaccination story which suggested that new COVID vaccines carried health risks as they were based on monkey tissues. The most striking cartoon they had found showed our Prime Minister as a 'Bigfoot' character having taken the vaccine. Yet even in revealing this intentional mischief, the Times came under attack for even showing visual examples of the material, and some public health advocates argued that as with QAnon above, the oxygen of publicity simply feeds more and more distrust in public health measures. It’s a difficult judgement for newspapers and broadcasters alike to make.  

The advances made in global public health in a generation have been immense. Yet that success itself has bred complacency. As a child I remember being vividly aware of the terrible effects of polio on a generation of children, and parents duly accepted the need for oral polio vaccine without demur. Now that polio has been wholly eradicated in many parts of the world, people are less likely to believe in the threat, when they can’t see its effects with their own eyes. In any case, we lived in times when it was much less acceptable to challenge established medical science. And even if you did, you could not easily find a digital echo chamber of thousands of others who shared your baseless fears.  

The striking success of public broadcasters in countering health disinformation remains one of the strongest arguments for our own existence. For its only when the most serious circumstances arise that people really start to question who they can trust. Certainly we saw a huge spike in traffic to BBC websites in the first stages of the pandemic – which reassured me that in the toughest moments, audiences still have an instinctive sense of where to turn, and demonstrated the full value of the trust in our brands, laid down over generations. But it’s a brittle structure to rely on – and with the institutions of public broadcasting under threat in many European countries, let alone elsewhere in the world, we should all redouble our efforts to speak together with one voice. With such a present threat to the health of our own populations, we have a duty to continue the fight to defend trust in public health.   

Jamie Angus has worked for BBC News since 1999. He has been Editor of the Today programme and The World at One, for BBC Radio 4, and held a number of roles in BBC World Service Group, most recently as Deputy Director.