We all have that one conspiratorial friend who advocates that you “do your own research.” It’s a good idea in principle, but I can’t help but recall how Shel Silverstein said “don’t do research; when you do research, you’re just reading something written by somebody who didn’t do research.”
And yet the truth is, we do have to do some research to properly vet a news/internet landscape that appears increasingly fraught with disinformation, misinformation, and malinformation when, as author Theodore Sturgeon claimed, “90 percent of everything is crap.”
If you often cite the shortcomings of the “lamestream” media, this article probably won’t steer you back toward those sources, but it is meant to suggest that Sturgeon’s Law applies to online fringe media every bit as much as it does to any other source (and in many cases, more so). While Sturgeon’s Law could be argued to be somewhat hyperbolic oversimplification, there are several other principles everyone should utilize to vet the media.
Occam’s Razor (attributed to 14th century theologian William of Ockham) states that “the simplest explanation is usually the best one.” This basic principle can be applied to virtually all of what we read and view on the internet, but it can be particularly useful when applied to 9/11 conspiracy theories. Many self-described 9/11 “truthers” claim that the World Trade Center Twin Towers, along with the much discussed Building 7, didn’t actually collapse from two plane collisions, but instead due to an “inside job” utilizing timed explosives. Occam’s razor cuts right through this narrative.
If a nefarious government planned the World Trade Center attack to justify foreign war and occupation within the Middle East (as the truthers allege), and they went through all the trouble to plant explosives, then why go crash the commercial airliners? I mean, it’s not as if terrorists have never used bombs before. Hell, back in February 26, 1993, terrorists Ramzi Yousef and Eyad Ismoil (among others) utilized a van filled with explosives in the first attempt to take the Towers down. And, if the motive was war, occupation, and regime change in Iraq (and later Afghanistan), why instead blame the attack on a terrorist group with members from Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and Egypt?
The real truth is that, despite the once popular hashtag asserting that “jet fuel can’t melt steel beams,” the heat generated was more than enough to warp and compromise the integrity of the steel. Building 7’s structural integrity suffered from large amounts of falling debris and fires of its own that went largely ignored, as firefighters on the scene understandably prioritized the Twin Towers themselves. Truthers often ignore this and take on more of an Occam’s Broom approach, choosing to ignore inconvenient facts and whisk them away under a rug of willful ignorance.
As opposed to being merely incompetent, many 9/11 truthers prefer to view then-President George W. Bush as some ever plotting, Machiavellian style Bond villain, which highlights another principle — Hanlon’s Razor. Attributed to (the perhaps apocryphal) Robert J. Hanlon, the saying goes that you should “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
In some circles of the internet, there’s been a bit of a moral panic around child sex trafficking and alleged, politically connected pedophilia rings. In the wake of numerous revelations regarding Jeffrey Epstein, some of this is understandable. Child trafficking and child sex abuse are real world horrors that actually transpire, but collective overestimation can lead to further chaos. The past patrons and employees of Washington, D.C.’s Comet Ping Pong pizzeria probably agree.
On December 4, 2016, 28-year-old North Carolina native Edgar Maddison Welch marched into Comet Ping Pong with an AR-15 assault rifle and two other loaded firearms, causing diners (including several children) to flee in fear as Welch fired multiple rounds through a locked closet door, because he believed the restaurant functioned as a front for nefarious pedophilic activity.
Welch became radicalized by the baseless online conspiracy theory that grew after WikiLeaks published the emails of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s former campaign manager. While it ought go without saying that none of these emails gave credence to the notion that multiple high-ranking Democrats were involved in child abuse, child trafficking, or underage child sex rings, proponents of what came to be called “Pizzagate” believed that they used coded messages to do so, and Comet Ping Pong was a hub for it all.
If you apply Hanlon’s Razor to Welch’s actions, you see someone who was actually trying to do the right thing because he was duped. You might be able to say something similar about Jim Caviezel (star of the largely embellished Sound of Freedom film), who’s recently given some lip service to the conspiracy theory that world elites harvest adrenochrome, a chemical compound that QAnon proponents and others say is taken from the blood of children during Satanic ritual abuse. All that said, Hanlon’s Razor doesn’t excuse the tacit lunacy of Caviezel’s beliefs, or the outright criminal and dangerous behavior of Welch.
One of the major peddlers of Pizzagate was Alex Jones. After humble beginnings on public access television and broadcast radio in the ’90s, Jones’ InfoWars website came to skew or outright lie about numerous news, cultural, and current event topics. Through InfoWars, Jones has pushed misinformation surrounding everything from the Apollo 11 Moon landing to the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting (which Jones had, in numerous broadcasts, claimed to be a false flag operation carried out by the government, with the intent of restricting Second Amendment gun rights).
When challenged on the these matters, Jones has often resorted to a juvenile rhetorical tactic commonly known as the Gish Gallop.
Utilizing the Gish Gallop (coined by anthropologist Eugenie Scott and named after creationist Duane Gish), defensive grifters like Jones attempt to derail their challengers with a bombardment of hyperbole, ad hominem attacks, and non sequiturs intended to confound and run out the clock in uncomfortable interviews. In his appearances as a guest of Megyn Kelly and Elon Musk, when questioned on what he’s said regarding Sandy Hook (“my gut is, with the timing and everything that happened, this is staged,” among other things), Jones would repeatedly fall back on several sly sidesteps.
Among them was that he himself was not the shooter (a tacit strawman tactic), how he was merely reporting on what others had said first (some of whom, such as discredited school safety administrator Wolfgang Halbig, Jones had personally platformed), how he isn’t a formally trained journalist (never mind the fact that he despises academia and accredited journalists), how he was merely playing Devil’s advocate, and how the parents of Sandy Hook victims pursuing lawsuits against Jones later confessed to him they were merely being used by conniving lawyers (an outright lie) — all in the pathetic hope that he’ll overwhelm his critics.
Carl Sagan
As laid out in his television series Cosmos, the late astronomer and science communicator Carl Sagan stressed that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” an idea that came to be called the Sagan Standard. Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and others would apply this to the arguments of creationists who’d advocate for the teaching of “intelligent design” in schools. Dawkins rightly asserted that while the evidence for evolution is ample, the inferred evidence for intelligent design largely relies on a “god of the gaps” fallacy that zeroes in on the blind spots of scientific discovery, and (without evidence) inserts a divine and all-powerful creator.
A noteworthy cousin to the Sagan Standard is Hitchens’ Razor, gifted to us by the late journalist Christopher Hitchens. Acting as a ruefully blunt flip side to the Sagan Standard coin, Hitchens’ Razor maintains that “what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.” Hitchens’ Razor can be applied to virtually all forms of pseudoscience, including the social media resurgence regarding flat Earth belief.
Today’s flat-Earthers insist that belief in the world as a sphere (or rather, an oblate spheroid) is the result of brainwashing and indoctrination by the government, mainstream media, and academics (specifically those employed by NASA). But really, the Earth’s curvature is readily provable, even for laymen. For instance, Polaris (a star visible virtually everywhere within the Northern Hemisphere) can’t be seen below 1.23 degrees south latitude. This not only proves that the planet’s surface is curved, but allows for the calculation that the circumference of the Earth is about 40,000 kilometers.
Flat-Earthers who also maintain that the Sun and Moon are small, local, and enclosed under a celestial “firmament” dome, hold stubbornly to their beliefs without real, tangible evidence. Hitchens’ Razor affords us the ability to not waste our time refuting such baseless claims.
While conspiracies historically have occurred (such as the Tuskegee syphilis study), the skeptical principals above place the burden of proof firmly at the feet of the conspiracy theorist.
Every February, to help celebrate Darwin Day, the Science section of AIPT cranks up the critical thinking for SKEPTICISM MONTH! Skepticism is an approach to evaluating claims that emphasizes evidence and applies the tools of science. All month we’re highlighting skepticism in pop culture, and skepticism *OF* pop culture.
AIPT Science is co-presented by AIPT and the New York City Skeptics.
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