This is America. Once we were 50 years behind America. Unfortunately, the madness of the day is a reality here too. As a result, #complottheorie s spread next to the virus. And for companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter, long-standing questions about how to deal with wrong information on their platforms have never been more relevant.

Scientists have studied Covid-19 in real time as the world collectively is going through a traumatic, world-changing event. It's killed over half a million people and we still don't have all the answers.

The world shrank under the weight of the new coronavirus pandemic. Conspiracy communities (Flat Earth, Grain Circles) that previously only pushed along each other abruptly went in the same direction to a gigantic mass of suspicion.

Take Larry Cook, whose evolving belief system takes place in a remarkable way on Facebook. Cook is the man behind the largest antivaccination group on the platform, Stop Mandatory Vaccination, which, along with his personal Facebook page, serves as a central clearing office for misinformation about antivaccines.

In the months since the onset of the pandemic, Cook begins to claim that it is a pretext for mandatory testing, tracking and vaccination that he was afraid of all along. He also begins to turn to people who can explain what's really going on, and a certain amount of hope: Cook promotes Qanon ideas, sometimes dozens of times a day. (QanOn is an ur conspiracy theory that broadly states that Donald Trump and his allies on a number of fronts bravely fight back against a shadowy, satanic deep state.)

“I AM A DIGITAL SOLIDER,” Cook recently posted along with two Q-related hashtags, part of an “oath” that the mysterious Q had recently asked his followers. (The disgraced former Trump Advisor General Michael Flynn was one of those who took the oath.) Link to a web page that shares Q's missions, Cook added in another post: “Find out why we have a lockdown and mask requirements for the sent.”

'Plandemic is dangerous, viral nonsense.
But it's not just QanOn. The tension of life at this particular time, with a lingering, devastating pandemic and a global uprising against police violence and racial injustice coming together at the highest speed, has accelerated something that has been going on for years.

Call it the singularity of the conspiracy: the place where many conspiracy communities suddenly meet and merge, a melting pot of unimaginable density.

UFO conspiracy theorists and Qanon fans advocate drinking a bleach solution promoted by anti-vaxxers. Both Anon groups and Reopen America groups promoted Plandemic, a video full of conspiring claims about the causes and spread of COVID.

The Freedom Angels, an anti-vaccination group based in California, are among the many such groups participating in anti-lockdown protests, using language strongly attracted by the Patriot movement: they call at home 'tyranny', appealing to their followers as' patriots' and positioning themselves as 'a new civil rights movement'.

(They urged people to burn their face masks on July 4th and added flowery: “Join millions of Americans on Independence Day as we show all these BLUE STATE GOVERNORS, SWAMP DOCS and DEEP STATE RATS how we feel about their latest ORDERS, DICTATES and MANDATES to carry our muzzles again.

All this seems familiar to me, the same slogans and the same remarks 'new civil rights movement' are getting more and more firmly on the ground here too.






The inescapability of the conspiracy has arrived