The BBC's authors told how to communicate with conspiracy theorists during the Christmas holidays: instead of criticizing and discussing alternative points of view, readers are asked to simply reject them.
Less than a month ago, Boris Johnson voiced plans to recklessly ease coronavirus restrictions between December 23 and 27.
However, last week the British Prime Minister reversed his position and made an extremely annoying but predictable statement, effectively canceling Christmas for a huge part of the population.
And yet, according to the BBC, during the holidays for the British, the risk of being one and a half meters away from loved ones, obsessed with dangerous ideas from alternative sources, is still quite high, hence the publication of five tips on how not to ruin Christmas by discussing conspiracy theories ".
Pass the fried potatoes
The book begins with a few bizarre and confusing situations that most readers will almost certainly — and thankfully — never encounter.
“You already have a bad feeling ... Passing the fried potatoes, your uncle casually notes that under the pretext of being vaccinated against the coronavirus, people will be injected with microchips to track any movements,” the manual begins gloomily.
- After a couple of beers, your friend may out of the blue declare that COVID-19 "does not exist."
Or a relative you haven’t seen in ages will start telling creepy stories about QAnon and the baby-eating Satanists among the ruling elites, thereby ruining your dessert pleasure. ”
Few would argue that it is imperative to confront anti-scientific beliefs based on distorted information that determine (for which there is evidence) preventable mortality, or the crazy far-right ravings that pedophile Satanists run a global network that sells children into sex slavery, and conspiracy against their number one enemy, Donald Trump (such views are directly related to numerous violent crimes).
And the BBC's five tips are - “stay calm;
do not dismiss someone else's opinion;
encourage critical thinking;
ask questions;
do not expect immediate results ”- also seem quite reasonable and useful in any situation where a dispute or disagreement arises.
But at the same time, it is quite obvious that the benefit of the British state television and radio corporation is not a reflection of a sincere desire to teach concerned citizens how to skillfully and constructively fend off the arguments of dangerously misleading friends and relatives, but just another episode of the establishment's long-started information campaign using the terms " conspiracy theory "and" disinformation "as weapons.
For example, as noted in the "Encourage Critical Thinking" section, conspiracy theorists often say they "research the topic on their own."
According to the BBC, this is a problem, since such "research, as a rule, involves watching videos of pseudo-experts on YouTube, following obscure personalities on Facebook and pulling facts from the posts of biased Twitter users."
Such a broad generalization obviously implies that
all
alternative and / or little-known sources of information are by definition dubious and people should only trust the opinion of reputable leading experts, represented, for example, on the BBC.
This is an extremely dubious statement, especially given the tendency of the Western media to
pull out
evidence for the sake of their own rhetoric and impersonate
incomprehensible marginal
personalities
as
experts
, giving weight and legitimacy to their words, despite their lack of any professional experience or education related to the topic under discussion.
As the ironic quotation of a "reformed" conspiracy theorist, quoted in the article, says,
"it's not hard to find experts and educated people who can convincingly present absolutely any point of view."
"For anyone who pays"
There is no better example of this behavior than the controversial Bellingcat site, which publishes investigations based on "open source" data.
Its head and founder, Eliot Higgins, who doesn't even remember exactly which course he failed to complete in college, openly admits that he gained experience collecting data obsessively playing video games.
At the same time, the world media consider the activities of Higgins and his organization to be beyond doubt and do not try to challenge their statements.
This is despite the fact that even Bellingcat supporters and authors accuse the site of publishing data received from Western intelligence services.
If this is true, then the question arises of which part of this information is reliable and which is not.
Interestingly, Higgins and his Bellingcat colleague Arik Toler were instrumental in the creation and promotion of First Draft, an anti-disinformation organization.
The name of the organization's lead researcher, Claire Wardle, appears repeatedly in a BBC manual.
And given the origins of the First Draft organization, many of its comments are surprising.
“Ask yourself who is pushing these ideas and what they want to achieve. For example, financial gain ... or reputation gain to attract new followers, ”says Wardle.
Higgins, of course, avoids directly answering the question about Bellingcat funding, although an evaluation of the company, initiated by its unofficial sponsor, the UK Foreign Office, says he and his team have been
"discredited"
by "
spreading disinformation"
and
"willingness to report for anyone who pays
.
"
Strange point: Fact-checker Claire Wardle claims that trying to verify the truth of the claims of
“a man who truly believes in conspiracy theories”
is the wrong approach.
In her opinion,
"within the framework of such conversations", "emphasizing the tactics and methods used by persons disseminating disinformation"
is "a
more effective way"
than
"trying to refute their words
.
"
It turns out that we are asked to forget about the topic of conversation, focus on the personality and / or nature of the source of information and brush aside any statements solely on this basis?
"Helps stop rumors"
Also among the creators and contributors to the First Draft initiative is the social media outlet Storyful, a subsidiary of News Corp.
media mogul Rupert Murdoch.
Inexplicably, Alastair Aitken is among the leaders of Storyful, the creator and until May 2017 the commander of the 77th British Ground Forces Brigade, responsible for information warfare.
Throughout 2020, officials have repeatedly confirmed that the 77th Brigade is central to the UK government's efforts to tackle the coronavirus pandemic.
In April, during a briefing with the Prime Minister, General Nick Carter - the most senior officer of the British Armed Forces, and also, as it turned out, the former Honorary Commander of the 77th Brigade - spoke about the various measures taken by the military to help the authorities (in the fight against coronavirus -
RT
), and noted that the 77th brigade "is helping to suppress rumors based on false information, as well as counter disinformation."
Further, after Boris Johnson announced the already canceled relaxation of restrictions on Christmas, The Times reported that the 77th Brigade had been deployed to counter coronavirus-related "online propaganda" and this was done with the approval of the Operational Response Team of the Cabinet Secretariat. army and the Center for Government Communications.
Despite claims that the 77th Brigade is fighting "misinformation," there is worrying evidence that the brigade, among other things, used real, fake, and automatic social media accounts to spread pro-government messages and discredit those who criticize the prime minister for catastrophic failure to cope with the pandemic.
Government and military officials deny the brigade's involvement in domestic operations and claim that its covert mission skills "have not been used or used against British citizens."
However, in June, the British Army Secretariat provided scientific researcher Emma Bryant with a statement that indicated otherwise.
“As a British government unit, they (brigade -
RT
) work for two main customers: government departments and British citizens, as well as for anyone who wants the information on the network to be reliable,” the secretariat said in a statement.
"The activities of the 77th brigade ... follow the same rules followed by the civil servants with whom it works."
As an expert on government information warfare, Bryant was deeply alarmed by this revelation.
She believes that "the ill-conceived participation of this military unit in resolving such sensitive issues" rather even contributed to "increasing mistrust of important information about the pandemic, precisely among those population groups in which paranoia about government measures taken in connection with COVID is most developed. 19".
In fact, the involvement of the 77th Brigade in an active fight against the pandemic likely only increased skepticism about the virus and further fueled conspiracy theories.
Also important is the fact that General Nick Carter was replaced in the 77th Brigade by Alexander Aiken, the chief political strategist of the British government.
Among other things, Aiken oversaw the creation of the aforementioned Rapid Response Team.
In July 2018, his article was published on the government's website, which admitted that one of the targets of the Group was "alternative sources of information."
The article was later deleted, and it's not hard to see why - after all, it was a rare and open admission of the establishment's tireless drive to discredit, isolate and suppress any dissent and inconvenient facts, regardless of their accuracy, as evidenced by the material on the BBC website.
The author's point of view may not coincide with the position of the editorial board.