Episode 2: Conspiracy and Racism

[00:00:00] Tressie McMillan Cottom: There’s a different historical and political valence to being distrustful of the government. If your distrust is rooted in demonstrable evidence that the government is sometimes out to get you-

[00:00:11] Dr. Deen Freelon: You value White supremacy so much that you’re willing to put your own health on the line just to uphold it.

[00:00:18] Kathryn Peters: Welcome to Does Not Compute, a podcast about technology, people and power by the Center for Information Technology and Public Life at the University of North Carolina. This week, our host is Dr. Deen Freelon, an associate professor at the Hussman School of Journalism and Media and a principal researcher at CITAP. Our guests are Dr. Daniel Jolley of Northumbria University, and Jacquelyn Mason, a researcher focusing on mis- and disinformation in Black and Latinx communities. We’ll also hear from CITAP researchers Alice Marwick and Tressie McMillan Cottom.

[00:00:51] Deen: Pop quiz, what two conspiracy theories and racism have in common? My initial answer when this thought popped into my head last year was, well, maybe more than people think, but as always, the answer is far from straightforward. As a researcher of political communication, I typically spend a probably unhealthy portion of my waking hours consuming media, and that’s during a normal year, but with COVID cutting off most of my favorite avenues of human contact, I sank even deeper into our collective information firehose.

I watched in scholarly horror as well-compensated liars spouted unscientific wishful thinking about COVID not being a big deal, or maybe not even being real in the first place, about masks making people sick, telling us we should all inject bleach into our veins, oh, and also, Bill Gates and George Soros are behind it all like they always are.

[00:01:39] Judith Mikovits in Plandemic: This is the crime behind letting somebody like Bill Gates with billions of dollars-

[00:01:45] Deen: Meanwhile, the resurgence of Black Lives Matter in the wake of George Floyd’s murder lead once again to worldwide protests against police brutality, and just as with COVID, it didn’t take long for the internet conspiracy machine to start spitting out racist slander against the movement, that its members are violent arsonists who hate the nuclear family, practice witchcraft, and are also led by, conveniently, unnamed White people.

[00:02:06] Tucker Carlson on Fox News: That’s exactly what defund the police really means. It means a woke militia policing our cities.

[00:02:12] Deen: What I found most interesting is that both types of conspiracies are most likely to be embraced by individuals on the political right. In these cases, conspiracy theories serve as useful weapons against targets like the scientific medical establishment and people who believe racism exists and is also bad. The more people believe conspiracy theories implicate groups that believers already dislike, the less credibility and success such groups are likely to enjoy.

The overlapping timing of these clusters of theories got me thinking about whether racist beliefs might be related to a general psychological tendency to believe false claims that fit with one’s pre-existing worldview.

[00:02:52] Deen: Basic logic here is that if you’re willing to believe all sorts of terrible and false things about Black people and other minority groups, you might also be willing to believe highly implausible claims about science, medicine, politics, and other topics. If this tendency to uphold ideology, where the facts really is a hallmark of the right wing, that has obvious implications for how we as a society should target our anti-conspiracy theory interventions. To start with the former, I reached out to Dr. Daniel Jolley, a psychologist at Northumbria University in England, and an expert in the psychology of conspiracy theories.

I wanted to ask you about your study, exposure to intergroup conspiracy theories promotes prejudice which spreads across groups. I really want to commend you on the intelligibility of that title. Sometimes, those are not always the most intelligible. This was published last year in the British Journal of psychology. Now, in this study, you ran a series of three experiments demonstrating some troubling links between exposure to conspiracy theories and prejudice, not only toward the groups implicated in the theories, but also to other unrelated groups, which was quite surprising for me.

The first question I have here is, am I interpreting your study correctly that exposure to conspiracy theories appears to make people more prejudiced?

[00:04:03] Dr. Daniel Jolley: That would be a correct assumption of the research, yes. Before our piece of research, there’s been lots of correlational research suggesting there’s a link between conspiracy beliefs and prejudice, but the causation, what causes what was not as clear. We were really keen to try and work out, if someone is exposed to conspiracy information about a particular group, so for example, about Jewish people, can this change how they see a Jewish person? Can it increase negativity towards that person?

That is indeed what we’ve demonstrated in those three experiments, where people are exposed to this information versus a controlled condition, for example, that this exposure can increase this negativity, and also a measure of discrimination. Importantly, we also demonstrated that this effect can generalize to other outgroups. For example, we found that people who are exposed to Jewish conspiratorial theories had more negativity towards Jewish people, but also to other outgroups that are seen to be different to the individual. It’s what we call the attitude generalization that goes out.

[00:05:11] Deen: Might it also be true that people who start off with some level of prejudice may then be more disposed to engaging with or believing conspiracy theories?

[00:05:21] Daniel: In essence, it’s people’s prior beliefs, people’s ideology interacting with their conspiratorial beliefs. Often, people believe in conspiracies that meet that prior belief. If you believe that a group is bad, for example, you’re more likely to endorse conspiracies about that group. A real key example, at least in America is, Democrats believe in conspiracies about Republicans and Republicans about Democrats, because, in essence, it meets their prior beliefs.

I think what you say there is totally accurate. I do think if we were to see what we call a moderator to see, does people’s level of prejudice make the effect more pronounced? I bet you would find that. It’s just something that we didn’t measure.

[00:06:02] Deen: Do you think that conspiracy theories and prejudice in general share similar underlying psychological risk factors and defense mechanism? These would be things like possibly high need for control, prediction, belief that one’s own group is oppressed, what’s called a need for cognition or critical thinking, believing anecdotes over data, ignoring conflicting evidence, that sort of thing. Are there any underlying psychological mechanisms that seem to be shared across both prejudice and conspiracy ideation?

[00:06:30] Daniel: I would say definitely. Absolutely. With conspiratorial beliefs, we know that people who lack feelings of control, that they have real need to try and, in essence, address that need, are more likely to believe in conspiratorial theories. I do think these two things go hand in hand, which may go back to that first assumption at the start, where if you’re predisposed to be prejudiced towards a certain group, you indeed may engage in conspiratorial theorizing because you’ve got to the same point due to the same kind of psychology, in essence, the high need for control, or the thinking your group’s oppressed, thinking the other group is out to get you.

Yes, of course, conspiracy beliefs are intergroup as well by the fact that you want to see yourself as different from another group, that the other group is conspiring against you, and is a way for you to help your self-esteem of you and your group, believing in a conspiracy that the other group is involved in fraud will be really appealing.

[00:07:23] Deen: Have you seen in your research or in the research with which you’re familiar any sorts of what we might call ideological asymmetries in propensity to engage with conspiracy theories? One hypothesis is that people who are on the right wing are more likely to engage with this because of some of the psychological underpinnings of conservatism. Have you been convinced by the evidence of this, or do you think it’s more even-handed, about the same on the left as on the right?

[00:07:49] Daniel: That’s a really great question about the role of, in essence, political orientation. There is varied literature out there on that. It seems to be given that at each end of the continuum it’s stronger. Strong left and strong right are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories. A recent paper in political psychology demonstrated that, actually, it seems to be more pronounced on the right. So if you’re more conservative, you are likely to believe in conspiracies. It’s not suggesting that it’s not there on the left as well, it’s just that it’s bit more pronounced on the right.

In essence, it’s people engaging in these kind of mindset, where, again, back to that point, you think your group is oppressed, whereby whether it’s perceived or actual, it’s that feeling of oppression that can make you believe in conspiracies that others are out to get you and harm your group, which, again, could be on the left or could be in the right, but just to flag that. There’s certain nods to suggest that it’s slightly more pronounced on the right.

[00:08:43] Dr. Deen: Excellent. Great. Thank you for joining us, I really appreciate that.

Throughout the pandemic, COVID-related conspiracy theories have gained a disturbing foothold in Black-American communities. Some of the most popular such theories are that COVID is some divine punishment or for anti-Black biological warfare, and that coronavirus vaccines are unsafe. These conspiracy theories seem different in that they’re not necessarily driven by prejudice or ideology, but more often by the history of anti-Black medical neglect and abuse in the United States. The truth of medical racism creates a context within which lies about specific diseases and medical technologies can seem likely to the detriment of the believers health.

Clearly, conspiracy theories are not only a problem for the right, but I wanted to explore some of the similarities and differences between right-leaning conspiracy theories, and those that appeal to other groups using Black Americans as a case study. Thank you very much. Here with Jacquelyn Mason. These questions were drawn from some of the work that you did at First Draft News on how mis- and disinformation and conspiracy theories affect Black people and people of color more generally.

This also builds on a specific report that you wrote about conspiracy theories that were promoted by the Nation of Islam, which has a long history of promoting conspiracy theories. To what extent are the conspiracy theories favored by the Nation of Islam, and Black people more generally. To what extent are they distinctive versus shared by other non-Black groups?

[00:10:09] Jacquelyn Mason: There hadn’t been a long anti-vaccine history within the Nation of Islam. Louis Farrakhan had often disparaged vaccines as an attempt of genocide on the Black community or using the Black community as guinea pigs for vaccines. When COVID vaccines came around, we saw an immediate uptick in this kind of rhetoric on pages, which influencers from the Nation of Islam were posting.

If we’re looking at historical legacies of Black people and harms that have been done to Black people through medical atrocities, like Tuskegee experiments and things like that, they were reusing and re-hatching these experiences that plagued the Black community. If you put it with conspiracy theories more generally, yes, generally, conspiracy theories, there’s always going to be that these vaccines are here to kill you, these vaccines are here to harm you, this is a government conspiracy theory.

We see things that tie vaccines to people, outside of the Black community, if you just look generally, George Soros, Bill Gates. We still see those conspiracy theories heavily in the Black community. Not trusting the CDC, Dr. Fauci, Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett, who was one of the developers of the vaccine. We saw that from White social media users using that narrative. They’re trying to either use someone like her as a pandering method. Pandering comes up a lot.

[00:11:28] Deen: I’m also curious about– you brought this up and I want to hear more about this. I think that there are certain conspiracy theories such as that the vaccines are harmful or whatnot, or that shadowy forces like Bill Gates or George Soros are behind them, that are embraced both by Black people en masse as well as White people. What are some of the differences in terms of why Black people might embrace a conspiracy theory and then versus why White people might embrace the same conspiracy theory?

From an outsider’s perspective, it may seem, “Okay, well, they’re both embracing the same conspiracy theories.” What are some of the different reasons why members of these two groups may embrace a conspiracy theory like this?

[00:12:04] Jacquelyn: When I was at First Draft, something that we did always say is that there is a grain of truth in every mis- and disinformation. You look at the historical legacies of the medical trauma within the Black community, you look at the current traumas, just from the qualitative research and analysis that we did, we talked to people and they essentially said, “Oh, I went to the doctor for COVID symptoms and I was turned away and I wasn’t taken seriously.” You’re still looking at historically and how currently Black people are still treated by medical health professionals.

This was especially in the beginning of the vaccine, people were saying, “We want Black people to take the vaccine first.” I think the media didn’t do the best job of reporting on vaccine hesitancy initially. They initially first one without really any proof besides some influencers that could be just spreading disinformation saying, “Hey, Tuskegee might not be why Black people don’t want to get vaccinated.”

Then this push to get Black people vaccinated and it’s like, “Whoa, wait a second. Why are we the ones going first?” Then it starts to go in line with those thoughts of, “This is experimental. They’re essentially trying to see if I want it.” Later down the line, we can now see that lack of access is a big problem for why Black people might not want to be vaccinated. At first, there was just this really strong push for, “You go first.” That push was made by government officials too. Then that feeds into distrust of government officials.

I think one thing that is very important is to make sure we did not put the onus necessarily always on Black people when we talk about vaccine hesitancy. I think that the media and other health services did make a general mistake in the beginning not really conveying the proper information. When we get bad information out there or any data void out there, it’s really hard to recover from that. I would say that really listening to Black people, people within the communities, understanding what’s happening on the ground in order to better report and better understand.

[00:14:00] Deen: I’m also thinking about the notion that conspiracy theories can both be a problem for the people who hold them as well as the people that are targeted by them. Obviously, with COVID-19 conspiracy theories, the danger there is if people don’t get vaccinated, they’re more vulnerable to virus. Then you can also think about conspiracy theories that are held by outside groups and that target those groups. A good example of that would be some of the conspiracy theories around the election and some of the anti-democratic legislation that’s been seen at the state-level across the country in terms of trying to suppress the votes of Black and the people of color.

Which of these do you think we should be more concerned with, conspiracy theories that are being embraced by marginalized people, Black people specifically, or those conspiracy theories embraced by others, of which marginalized individuals are the targets?

[00:14:46] Jacquelyn: That’s interesting, I think, because we’re seeing– Through our research, we really worked with communities of color, but Black and Latinx communities, but then looking at how other communities bump up against each other, that misinformation, in particular I can talk about the disinformation we’ve been seeing in the AAPI community about Black people, most of the heinous attacks that have been committed against members of the Asian community have not been by Black people. We’re still seeing all of these dangerous information fed towards Asian-American people to feed into this hatred and to like separate us. That’s scary too.

Looking into what kind of disinformation comes into also Latinx community is a lot of anti-Black mis- and disinformation, especially around the election, trying to create a wedge and trying to get Latinx people to not necessarily vote Democrat, change their political leanings by using the anti-Blackness. I’m not sure which one would be necessarily more of a problem. They’re both a huge problem. I think that the mis- and disinformation and conspiracies that affect us cause real-world harms, which is very scary.

[00:15:55] Deen: What countermeasures do you think are most likely to work against conspiracy theories that are held by Black people?

[00:16:01] Jacquelyn: I think the community-based solutions are really great. I’ve been working with a collective for the last year called the Disinfo Defense League. It’s basically over 200 grassroots organizations fighting mis- and disinformation in Black and Latinx communities. We do this through trainings. At First Draft, while I was there, we trained people on how to monitor, how to see mis- and disinformation. We also had a text course where people could look at how mis- and disinformation proliferates across the internet. We would also do office hours with these different community leaders and speak with them and see what they’re seeing and what people in their community are saying.

[00:16:38] Dr. Deen: Thank You for talking to us. We’re really looking forward to your next move. This is the discussion portion of our podcast. I’m here with the very excellent, superlative Tressie McMillan Cottom and equally excellent, superlative Alice Marwick. We’re talking about the main theme of this episode, which is conspiracy theories and racism. A lot of the people who engage with conspiracy theories that are really outlandish and bizarre about topics like COVID and how masks kill you and things like these, and how the COVID vaccine is so awful, also tend to believe horrible things about racism, Black people, other minorities, et cetera.

That really got me thinking about the extent to which those things are related or it could be connected psychologically. If you’re willing to believe really crazy things about political issues and whatever is happening medically, technologically, et cetera, you may also be willing to believe some really bizarre and outlandish things and harmful things about racial minorities, Black people especially.

[00:17:39] Tressie McMillan Cottom: There is, I think, a really cogent argument for the idea that White supremacy is a disinformation campaign, and that historically and cyclical media has been extremely complicit in promoting, defining, and recycling ideas of White supremacy. That undercurrent has always been there. When you’ve got 19th century newspapers, for example, that are trafficking in images and rhetoric around Chinese people being descended from a different arm of the human species, that’s a misinformation and disinformation campaign. That’s not about the technology. That’s about what whiteness ask you to do.

Part of what it asks you to do is to disbelieve your own eyes. You can look at another human being and see they are not this thing, but whiteness compels you to say something other than what your own senses can take in. It’s a fundamentally anti-intellectual, anti-enlightenment rational idea, but it is foundational to what whiteness and White supremacy does. Yes, I couldn’t agree more.

[00:18:54] Alice Marwick: We know that a lot disinformation sticks with people, it resonates, because it builds on preexisting narratives around identity, which are often based in disinformation around race, or gender, or religion. We also know that people are more likely to believe one conspiracy theory if they believe another. When you believe in conspiracy theory, by definition, you have to believe that the mainstream media has been lying to you, that you can’t trust institutions. If you believe, for example, that the government is lying to you about COVID, you might also believe that the government is lying to you about the moon landing, or chemtrails, or something that’s more outrageous.

When you dig down into a lot of these conspiracy theories, they come down to the same route, which is that there is this shadowy group of elites who are controlling the world. Often, that shadowy group of elites is rooted in anti-Semitism. A lot of the time it’s like the Jews controlling the world.

[00:19:56] Deen: One of the things that really jumped out at me the most, I was talking to a psychologist, he was saying that one of the main things that really underlies a lot of conspiracy theories is a sense on the part of the people who engage with these theories that they are somehow oppressed or powerless or something like this. It seems to me that a lot of people, especially on the right, who embrace these things, have it almost exactly backwards. It really made me think back to some of the original justifications for the Jim Crow laws. A lot of the justifications were, “We have to do this or they’re going to take over.”

These people who are basically powerless, they have this fear that’s driving it, or at least nominally driving it. We can’t really say whether they’re actually sincere in this belief, but that’s what they said. This disbelief about one’s own powerlessness that is completely belied by literally all of the evidence, I think, is one thing that really strikes me as especially interesting about how conspiracy theories operate.

[00:20:48] Alice: It all comes back to the same thing, that there’s fears of the other coming in and taking a place that is not rightfully theirs, a place that belongs to White people, to White Christian people. We see this narrative repeating itself over and over in all kinds of places; in conspiracy theories, in mainstream media coverage, and right-wing narratives, and disinformation narratives. The underlying basis is totally coherent.

[00:21:14] Tressie: Racism is an extremely coherent ideology. It is stable across time and place and space in a way that very few historical ideas have ever been. When you talk about a massively successful misinformation and disinformation campaign, there is not in my mind one more resilient and more stable and more resistant to context and contextual factors than the idea of White supremacy, whether you think that’s a biological supremacy or a cultural supremacy. It’s really resilient.

[00:21:47] Deen: Now I’m thinking about, there was a situation where some White nationalist had a post that went viral, who basically said, “Look, I’m not going to take the vaccine, because it really pisses liberals off.” Literally, it’s trolling as some kind of ideological expression.

My first thought when I saw that was, “Okay, clearly, you’re at the point where you’re demonstrating that– or you’ve reached the point where the extent of the White supremacy that you’ve invested in is now an active detriment to your health, and you’re doing it in a way that is weirdly self-conscious. Maybe you’re even on some level aware of this, but you value White supremacy so much that you’re willing to put your own health on the line just to uphold it.” That’s hard for me to fathom. You’re not going to—I can tell you as much as I want. That really– I don’t even know how to analyze that. Maybe you all can help me.

[00:22:33] Tressie: I will. I think one of the reasons why we struggle to synthesize that is because there’s nothing so valuable to us identity-wise than if we would sacrifice their health. I think the flip side and another way to think of that is, “Damn, it’s that good to be White that you would take a shorter lifespan?” Coincidentally, I have this paper with Arjumand Siddiqi and colleagues, and Darrick Hamilton, and Odmaa about social death of whiteness and the decline– We were looking at the declining life expectancy of White people.

If you look at a population level, lots of people are making that choice. They may not be making it as consciously as that dude, to be fair, I think, to your point, that he can articulate it. Lots of people are making that choice that, “Yes, it is that good. The value of my White identity politics is so valuable I will absolutely trade three, four years of life expectancy or quality of life.”

[00:23:29] Deen: I want to talk about one other piece of this. As I got deeper into this, obviously, if you’ve been around Black people, you know some of them do embrace some conspiracy theories. In other words, it’s not like the Whites got that corner. I was trying to articulate, what is the difference then between the kinds of conspiracy theories that White people embrace and the kinds that Black people embrace?

[00:23:48] Alice: There’s a reason that there are groups that deeply distrust the US government. The US government is not a benevolent actor when it comes to Black people and racialized minorities in general. There’s a long history of government actors doing horrible things to Black and brown people in the name of science. For example, during the Vietnam War, the US government decided that it was going to try to promote democracy across Asia by holding up civil rights and what they characterized as like Black people’s uplift as a positive way to promote the US.

At the same time, you have Black power movements in the United States who are saying like, “Hey, no, this is not what’s going on here. This is propaganda.” The US government was so threatened by that they instituted this massive surveillance operation, labelled all of those people communists, and put in place these militarized surveillance operations to discredit them. That’s without even mentioning things like the Tuskegee experiments and things like that.

[00:24:49] Tressie: As my great grandfather used to say, “Just because I’m crazy doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get me.” There’s a different historical and political valence to being distrustful of the government. If your distrust is rooted in demonstrable evidence that the government is sometimes out to get you, it may be calling on the same underlying psychological framework, where some human beings do just seem to be wired for a singular meta description that helps them manage their lack of control.

That is very different, and that being tapped, though, by demonstrable evidence that they’re out to get you is quite different than distrusting an institution that has never been out to get you, and that, in fact, has done everything to orchestrate and marshal massive resources to defend you, to create you, to bring you into social being. To distrust, to me, it is not the same kind of psychological relationship to be White and distrust of White government as it is to be non-White and distrust that government, even if they are operating from the same underlying psychological framework.

[00:26:00] Deen: What I find interesting about it is that it brings folks into the same place, which, at least in the context of COVID, it’s, “I’m not taking the vaccine.” Now, in both cases, it adds on to whatever preexisting health risks there is obviously, but for Black people, it’s going to be greater due to medical racism and everything else, but it still adds on to the risk that you have. You take different paths and it’s almost like you get to the same place.

[00:26:26] Kathryn: Different paths to the same place. That sums it up really beautifully. Thank you, Deen, for taking us on a trip to really see and understand both those paths. Thank you also to our guests, Daniel Jolley and Jacquelyn Mason for bringing their expertise to the topic, and to our CITAP guest, Alice Marwick and Tressie McMillan Cottom for their insightful discussion.

Next week, Alice Marwick will be hosting Does Not Compute, and she’ll be describing the origins of many popular medium manipulation tactics in White supremacist groups online. We can’t wait to share it with you.

Does Not Compute is the work of an amazing team, including our researcher hosts as well as executive producer Jacob Kramer-Duffield, senior producer and editor, Amarachi Anakaraonye, CITAP project coordinator and production assistant, Joanna Burke, and our music by Ketsa. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast listening platform as Does Not Compute. On the web, visit us at citap.unc.edu or connect with us on Twitter @unc_citap.