The article was met with an immediate and visceral reaction when posted to Twitter. Frustrated users reported that they had uninstalled the NHS COVID-19 app in anger, while others complained about the violation of their privacy and cited the European Convention on Human Rights. Some sneered at the notion that the app was ever going to respect individual privacy, and that this news validates their decision not to install it.
The problem is: the NHS COVID-19 app is not sending your contact details to the police, and uninstalling it is not going to protect your privacy.
The NHS COVID-19 app works by exchanging anonymous tokens—effectively very long random numbers—with other phones nearby. The tokens associated with a user change regularly, so your device will built a list of tokens it has assigned to you, and when each token was used. Each device running the app maintains two lists of these random numbers: the first contains every token it has sent to another phone in the past two weeks, the second list contains every token received from another phone in the same period.
When someone tests positive for COVID-19, their phone publishes the first list, the list of tokens it has sent to other devices, which other phones then download and compare to the list of tokens they have seen from other devices.
If there is a match, it means you have been in close enough proximity to someone who has a positive test result for your phones to have exchanged information. The app will then assess how likely it is that you were exposed to the virus during that encounter, based on several factors including the strength of the signal between your phones, and if the likelihood of exposure is sufficiently high it will generate a notification to advise to self-isolate.
At no stage in this process does the app gather your name, address, contact details or any other form of identifying information. The data it collects and publishes is a list of random numbers; there is simply no way for the app to tell the police anything. Even the partial postcode, gathered while setting up the app, does not leave your phone.
So, to what is HSJ referring?
The Department of Health confirmed to Sky News that it has agreed a “memorandum of understanding” with the National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC) to provide forces with contact information on those advised to self-isolate, on a case-by-case basis. In practical terms, this means that when investigating reports of someone who is not complying with a mandatory self-isolation period, police can now request information from NHS Test and Trace about whether that person has received a positive test.
However, this data looks to be coming from the COVID-19 test centres, not from the NHS COVID-19 app. Although both are part of the Test and Trace effort, the self-isolation notifications generated by the app are effectively anonymous. Nobody other than the user knows that their device has shown them a notification.
Privacy campaigners and public health experts, including the Chief Medical Officer and the British Medical Association, have cautioned that allowing police access to this data may discourage people from being tested and hamper efforts to control the spread of the virus—concerns which I share.
But uninstalling the NHS COVID-19 app is not a useful response, as it is not the source of these privacy issues. Deleting the app will serve only to exacerbate the problem by further undermining the Test and Trace infrastructure.
Finally, it is worth highlighting that the writing of this article was hampered by the requirement by HSJ’s website that the author provides personal information to them before being allowed to read the full article. HSJ also uses embedded tracking scripts to share user data with Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, Oracle, and others, without asking for permission from the reader first. I sincerely hope the irony of this is not lost on the editors at HSJ.
October is typically a pretty busy month for me and I am sure you can guess why. There is a certain date at the end of this, the spookiest of all months, that is an irresistible temptation for media folk looking for a hook for a story. This year is no exception. One of the emails I received recently was from the producer of an American radio show planning a programme on “the increasing prevalence of people who say they believe in ghosts or have seen a ghost in recent years – including the rise during our current pandemic.”
I was intrigued. Had there really been a rise during the pandemic? There are always fluctuations in opinion poll data relating to belief in and claimed experience of paranormal phenomena of all kinds. Endorsement rates can be affected by numerous factors including the wording of questions, the topicality of the subject, popular depictions in films and TV programmes at the time, and so on. Has belief in ghosts increased in recent years? Some evidence would appear to suggest that maybe it has. A report on the Chapman University Survey of American Fears shows a gradual increase from 2016 to 2018 in the percentage of Americans agreeing or strongly agreeing that “Places can be haunted by spirits”: in 2016: 46.6%; in 2017: 52.3%; and in 2018: 57.7%. On the other hand, a more recent 2019 YouGov poll found that only 45% said that ghosts “definitely exist” or “probably exist”. At the very least, we can conclude that a large proportion of the American public appear to believe in ghosts.
When it comes to assessing how many people claim to have actually seen a ghost, again the picture is not that clear. A survey by the highly respected Pew Research Center in 2009 reported that 18% of Americans claim that they have seen or been in the presence of a ghost. To me, this is a much more believable estimate than the dubious claim in a report in The Independent in 2018 that no less than 60% of Americans say that they have seen a ghost! Given that this figure is higher than estimates of levels of belief in ghosts, there would have to be quite a lot of people around who refuse to believe in ghosts despite having seen one!
But is there any evidence that the number of ghostly encounters has actually increased specifically during the pandemic? I am not aware of any such direct evidence. An article in the New York Times in May this year reported that John E. L. Tenney, a paranormal researcher and former host of a show called Ghost Stalkers, claims that during 2019 he received between two and five reports per month of haunted houses but that this has risen to five to ten reports per week during the lockdown – suggestive, if not conclusive, evidence.
It would not surprise me if there has indeed been such an increase. Mr Tenney, who believes that the vast majority of these cases are “completely explainable”, argues (and I would agree with him) that, “It does seem to have something to do with our heightened state of anxiety, our hyper-vigilance.” He also makes the valid point that, as most of us are spending more time at home, we are more likely to notice sounds like “hearing the bricks pop and the wood expand” when the sun comes up and the house starts to warm. Those sounds were always there, maybe we just used to sleep through them.
Evidence from around the world is accumulating supporting the claim that, for many people, sleep quality has deteriorated during the pandemic, presumably as a result of both the direct stress of worrying about one’s health but also that caused by indirect effects such as worries about finances, employment, and even relationship problems caused by social isolation. Poor nocturnal sleep quality will inevitably have effects during the day including difficulties with memory and attention. So maybe it wasn’t a ghost who moved your car keys, maybe you just forgot where you put them? Sleep deprivation is also associated with an increased likelihood of hallucinatory experiences and paranoia, all of which may result in claims of being haunted.
One of the most common types of hallucinatory experience that leads people to believe that they have had a ghostly encounter is, as readers of The Skeptic will no doubt already know, sleep paralysis. Sleep paralysis is a temporary period of paralysis experienced in that twilight zone between sleep and wakefulness. It is often accompanied by a strong sense of presence, hallucinations, difficulty breathing, and intense fear. Sleep paralysis is experienced by about one in twelve people in the general population at least once in their lifetimes but the incidence is much higher (approaching 30%) in two specific sub-groups: students and psychiatric patients. Both of these sub-groups are known to have notoriously irregular sleep patterns, albeit for different reasons. One of the strongest correlates of sleep paralysis frequency is poor sleep quality and the latter is, of course, associated with stress, anxiety, and depression – levels of which have all increased dramatically during the pandemic.
So, as if we didn’t have enough to worry about with Trump, Brexit, and the pandemic, it looks like we are probably also experiencing an outbreak of increased ghostly activity. Who you gonna call?
Gather round friends, I want to tell you a true horror story. I can’t promise a twist ending; the monster is still going to turn out to be humans with funny hats on. What I can promise is a direct connection to a recent high-profile act of violence, and an increased anxiety about unregulated internet speech.
Our story begins in the lead up to the 2016 presidential election. Like many very online Millennials, I was posting a lot of political content to my personal facebook wall and getting some rather inflammatory pushback from individuals on the right. It got so bad that I started to get private messages from friends begging me to find an alternative venue. The final straw came when a Native American friend saw a thread where one right wing individual repeatedly referred to Dakota Access Pipeline protesters as “primitives” and “savages”. We’ll call this right-winger Bruce. Bruce, myself, and a few other regular participants decided to take our debates to a private group. A place where people from a truly broad range of perspectives could fully express their most controversial views at a safe distance from the rest of humanity. There was only one possible name for such a place: Monster Island.
As the resident mad scientist, I saw Monster Island as more than just a containment system for some of the worst people I’ve ever experienced: it was a place to experiment on those monsters, myself included. I wanted to study if it was possible for people from radically different worldviews to debate in an environment that had informal guidelines but no officially enforced rules. It was already clear in 2016 that the regulation of online speech was going to be a rolling disaster, producing an endless stream of rage against the moderators, who were invariably cast as biased against the right. Donald Trump himself has claimed that sites like Twitter and Facebook discriminate against right wing speech. Respectable experts have raised concerns about the lack of oversight for algorithmic moderation. Our failures to address this problem proactively seem to promote a desire in some to return to a “golden age” of the internet, before things got so big that moderation of speech on an epic scale became necessary. I had my doubts that less moderation was really the solution to our problems, and Monster Island presented a perfect chance to test my theories.
I would say things went about as well on Monster Island as they did in the Stanford Prison experiment, except we let the disaster run for 4 years instead of just a week. The only guideline we had going in was “what happens on Monster Island stays on Monster Island”, and yes I realize the irony of telling you about that here in a public forum. Think of this article as the letter at the beginning of a Lovecraft story, warning you of a place you should not go, only now you’re too far in to turn away. The forbidden knowledge of Monster Island calls to you. If I disappear in the night, you’ll know why.
Almost immediately we had to add the guideline “no deleting” as individuals started to delete sections of posts to mess with arguments or cover spots where they’d messed up. I call it a guideline because at this point we hadn’t had to actively enforce anything beyond stating the norms. What became clear though was that even the existence of those unenforced guidelines was an affront to some monsters’ sensibilities, and so they set to work testing the fences for weaknesses. They used all the typical troll techniques. Do things that are very close to breaking the guidelines and then force everyone to argue over whether they count. Look for other horrible things they could do that weren’t technically in violation of any guidelines, just to see if it would force us to develop new guidelines in response. It was always a losing battle, because there is a fundamental asymmetry between order and chaos, and chaos always has the advantage in tempo. One troll named Ryan Balch, whose name I have not changed, for reasons that will become apparent, openly declared his intentions to destroy Monster Island, just to prove he could. Several trolls joined his cause.
The result was several years of the purest banality of evil. We ended up needing to add rules against doxxing, blocking admins, explicit threats of physical violence, and taking photos from people’s personal profiles and photoshopping them into sex acts with military dictators. Meanwhile, the quality of discourse deteriorated from semi-functional, where some folks could have actual arguments or at least do a dance that looked vaguely like presenting evidence, to endless spam of the most disturbing memes you’ve thankfully never seen. Here’s a relatively mild example from Ryan Balch that still conveys the type of content we were inundated with:
At some point in the first year we had to start kicking people, though not for material like this, since this post did not violate any Monster Island rules. People really only got kicked when they explicitly broke a stated rule. Even then, it just became a game of whack-a-mole as every troll had multiple sock puppet accounts. Of course, once that happened the reactionary behavior went up exponentially. We tried everything we could to stabilize the situation. Monster Island had always had left-leaning demographics, but we tried hard to invite more right wing folks to the island. That was how we ended up with a horde of Ryan Balchs. Perhaps it was just the result of which groups our right wingers ran in, but we found it nearly impossible to bring in right wing individuals who would even try to engage in debate before dropping some random hate speech. We even formed a leadership group where I represented the left, Bruce represented the right, and our mutual friend – let’s call him Peter – who helped us form the group originally stood for the moderates. Peter was technically a moderate conservative. Having leadership that explicitly leaned right was still insufficient. The right wingers claimed I still held absolute power over the group and they claimed Peter was too soft on the left and so Bruce was effectively outnumbered. Nothing short of giving Ryan Balch a leadership position was going to satisfy them, and thankfully we didn’t go with that option.
By year three it became clear that I’d gotten all the results I was going to get from this experiment, and the toxicity of the island was consuming more and more of my time and life-force, so about a year ago I gave up and swam for shore. Many would say it’s absurd I stuck with it that long, others would call me the worst monster of all for letting the experiment go on as long as I had, and they’re all probably correct. Some of the members seemed to still enjoy the group though, so I passed control over to Peter, set sail, and never looked back. I felt comfortable concluding that unmoderated discourse faces a tragedy of the commons no different than any other unregulated communal resource. There are places online where people who strongly disagree, up to a point, can engage productively. What those groups have in common is substantial rules and heavy moderator enforcement.
I approach the end of my cursed tale, and I promised you a connection to real world violence. If you haven’t placed Ryan Balch yet, give these two articles a quick read.
Ryan Balch got his three seconds of fame as the white supremacist who joined Kyle Rittenhouse and his militia buddies, allegedly as their “tactical advisor”, shortly before Kyle was involved in a shooting that claimed the lives of two protesters. Here is the relevant passage from the case filed against Balch, Rittenhouse, several militia groups, and Facebook:
While this lawsuit is unlikely to succeed for various reasons, it drives home how real-life violence is directly connected to online radicalization and organization. I can say pretty confidently that any material the media found when going through Ryan’s internet history pales in comparison to what he was sharing behind closed doors. As far as we know, Kyle Rittenhouse himself did not express white nationalist sentiments the way Ryan Balch frequently did. What Kyle did frequently post about was pro-police sentiments, and America is currently actively wrestling with the overlap between our policing system and white nationalism.
It’s hard to believe that a person from a Facebook group with fewer than 400 members ended up directly connected to vigilante violence against protesters. When we saw the news, Peter and I decided it was finally time, and Monster Island sank back into the internet ocean. I’m happy to see it gone, but I’m haunted by the dark irony that Ryan Balch ultimately made good on all his promises. He got out in the streets, and in doing so he destroyed Monster Island.
Like all highly successful disasters, Monster Island is rich in moral take-aways. Personally, I learned that I do not want to spent my time engaging with people like Ryan Balch, even as some Hail Mary attempt to change their minds or try to understand what mix of nature and nurture got them to that dark place. I do find learning about cult thinking and behavior endlessly fascinating, but I’ve no need to spend my daily life around it. The best I can do is pity, as that seems better than hate or anger.
More generally, I learned that discourse really only works if it’s properly moderated and everyone is committed to the system. That means that someone is going to have to be empowered to make decisions and enforce rules, and we’re going to have to find a way to invest enough trust to keep the discourse from collapsing. That’s a difficult prospect with so many individuals actively seeking to poison the discourse and keep it on life support so they can benefit from the disfunction. I learned from Monster Island that the group of people who just want to watch the world burn is larger than anyone wants to admit and that their goal is the easiest one to achieve.
These days I spend my Facebook hangout time in the Philosopher in Space Facebook group, which requires almost zero real time moderating for a few reasons. First, I moderate who’s allowed in and the few times we’ve had toxic people in the group they haven’t lasted long. Also, we’re not trying to have it out over extremely controversial issues. Most of the group is some version of left/liberal and the most heated debate ever was whether science and magic, and by extension sci-fi and fantasy are really distinct things. I strongly encourage everyone to find their own Philosophers in Space group and avoid anything that feels too much like Monster Island. You may think you can go for just a peek, but rage is addictive and you’ll end up another trapped soul.
Finally, I learned that the boundary between the online world of trolls and the real world of vigilante violence is much thinner than we want to believe. Balch’s symbolism above is repulsive when it’s made explicit, but there is a whole ecosystem of dog whistle versions of Balch’s symbolism that have infested mainstream right-wing culture. Here is a prime example:
James Lindsay from New Discourses shared this a tweet from Christopher Rufo, a director at the creationist think tank the Discovery Institute
Notice again the use of templar knights and the common theme of protecting western culture from the invasion of globalist forces and their social justice ideologies. Either the individuals involved in creating and sharing this image don’t understand the memetic pool they’re swimming in, or they’re unconcerned about the fact. Neither option seems like good skepticism, as this symbolism and the corresponding ideologies present a serious obstacle for promoting compassionate and constructive discourse on a variety of controversial issues. Skeptics need to be highlighting the role of internet on-ramps in radicalizing young white men, not participating in that process.
We still need to be able to talk to each other, and we need it to go better than Monster Island, or we’re going to follow Monster Island into the ocean.
I had only just recently stepped into the Big Shoes on The Skeptic’s editorial team when I gave a talk as part of a regular Sunday morning series at the home of free-thinking in London, Conway Hall. At packing-up time, I was approached by a small, aged attendee who smiled broadly as he introduced himself: “Hello. I’m Donald!”
Of course, I knew Donald Rooum’s work. He had generously contributed to the magazine since its earliest days, having written to founder Wendy Grossman after just the first issue to offer his services. Donald created the cartoon strip ‘Sprite’ for the magazine.
“The first character is named Donald and is based on me” he explained in an interview with The Comics Journal in 2002, “and the other character is Titania. She is a lady sprite who has a habit of disappearing into a swirl of smoke.” The love-struck Titania is always trying to reach through Donald’s scepticism, but it is so resolute that he simply cannot see her. “Some of the time I merely take a swipe at something in the world of the paranormal, but the best Sprite cartoons are the ones where I revert to the main plot.”
That meeting in London was the first of many – we moved in the same circles and bumped into each other often. The main thing that struck me was that, at an age when most people get a pass for snoozing, Donald was always sharp, alert… and smiling.
He had trained in commercial design at the Regional College of Art, Bradford for four years and became a professional typographer, later lecturing in typographic design at the London College of Printing until his retirement aged 55. His parallel career as a cartoonist saw his work appear in publications like The Daily Mirror, Private Eye and The Spectator and even the British women’s publication She. He greatly admired and was influenced by the British cartoonists who illustrated children’s comics in the early twentieth century – people like Reg Parlett, Roy Nixon, Ken Reid and The Bash Street Kids’ Leo Baxendale. Later, he expressed an admiration for underground comix artists Gilbert Shelton and Hunt Emerson.
But I suspect that Rooum will be most remembered for exposing corrupt British police officers in the notorious ‘Challenor’ case of 1962. Rooum was one of a group protesting against a visit to London by far-right and “inherently undemocratic” Queen Frederika of Greece when he was arrested. Officer Harold Challenor said “You’re fucking nicked my beauty. Boo the Queen, would you?” subsequently adding a rock to Rooum’s belongings: “Carrying an offensive weapon – you can get two years for that”. Fortunately Rooum had his solicitor take his jacket to a forensic scientist who confirmed that there was no trace of rock dust, or wear and tear in Rooum’s pockets, proving that the object could never have been there.
Rooum’s evidence led to an acquittal at his trial. A subsequent trial against Challenor and three other officers for perversion of the course of justice followed. Challenor avoided culpability, having been certified as suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, but his three colleagues were sentenced to three years each. A Parliamentary enquiry, in what became generally regarded as a whitewash, eventually exonerated Challenor and placed the blame for the incident on his mental condition as opposed to any institutional deficiencies. However, the blatant corruption and political biases within the Met., not to mention Parliament and the legal system, were exposed. Unusually for a person suffering from paranoid schizophrenia – a chronic condition for which drugs in the ‘60s weren’t up to much – Challenor was subsequently employable enough to find work with the firm of solicitors who had defended him.
Donald’s retirement from teaching at the London College of Printing freed him up to spend more time on art and his lifelong political interest in anarchism. He was a devoted volunteer at Freedom Press, an imprint which has published seven collections of his fortnightly cartoon ‘Wildcat Anarchist comics’. The strip takes stereotypes and gently prods at hubris within political movements. I recommend them. He was a humanist and a keen supporter of Humanists UK. He noted that many of his anarchist colleagues could be anti-science, but he himself was pro-science, even having gained a first class degree in Life Sciences in adulthood.
Donald’s partner was Irene Brown, with whom he had three daughters and a son. To judge by the attendance at his memorial gathering at Conway Hall in January of this year, he also had a large group of loving friends who regarded him very highly.
Founder of The Skeptic, Wendy Grossman said to me: “It’s a great loss. He was a defining part of the look and feel of The Skeptic. Humour is a crucial part of both the magazine and skepticism in general.” Former editor Professor Chris French said “The thing I loved most about Donald’s cartoons was that his gentle humour was as likely to be making fun of sceptics as it was of believers. He recognised the irrationality in all of us.”
Donald Rooum had a life that was very fully lived. He contributed greatly to free-thought causes all his life. And he was sparkling and alive in a way that many people don’t manage to maintain over a whole lifetime. R.I.P Donald. We will miss you.
The town of Itajai in the southern Brazilian state of Santa Catarina has been the focus of much puzzlement during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The town’s mayor – who is a medical doctor – has adopted a particularly striking strategy: to throw at the virus every conceivable alternative therapy or social media hype he can find.
It started with homeopathy, which he wanted to distribute as a prophylactic, using healthcare agents to deliver it personally to people’s homes, before moving on to hydroxychloroquine, then ivermectin and more recently, ozone therapy delivered by rectal insufflation. You don’t have to be an expert in medical terminology to work out how the ozone makes its way into the patient.
This last one, announced in early August, attracted a lot of attention – not just because of the obvious cheap jokes, but also because, in Brazil, the most vocal promoters of ozone therapy have strong links with the antivaccination movement, and they have powerful friends in high places.
Ozone is a corrosive, toxic gas. We need it in the stratosphere to block harmful UV radiation from the Sun, but closer to the ground, where people can inhale it, it is a health hazard and an indicator of air pollution, a component of smog: it can be formed by chemical reactions involving automobile emissions.
“Ozone therapy” is the putative use of ozone to treat health complaints. As it is common in the world of so-called complementary and alternative medicine, ozone has been proposed as a cure for every disease and condition under the sun, from HIV infection to cancer. Predictably, it has also been offered as a form of relief for COVID-19.
Itajai’s move was not exactly original: in April, a clinic in the United States was forbidden from promoting ozone as a cure for SARS-CoV-2. The FDA does not authorize the use of ozone therapy for any condition, and has stated that “ozone is a toxic gas with no known useful medical application in specific, adjunctive, or preventive therapy. In order for ozone to be effective as a germicide, it must be present in a concentration far greater than that which can be safely tolerated by man and animals”.
In Brazil, the Federal Board of Medicine forbids the use of ozone in regular clinical practice: ozone therapy can only be offered in the context of medical research. This fact, however, did not stop the Ministry of Health from including this modality in the official list of alternative medicines officially adopted by Brazil’s national healthcare system. In 2018, ozone therapy joined the other 28 CAM modalities currently paid for with taxpayers’ money (the list includes old chestnuts like homeopathy and acupuncture, alongside less popular ones like Reiki or Family Constellations).
The Ministry of Health’s official website describes ozone therapy as a “low-cost safe therapy” that can be used for several health conditions. It states: “Some health sectors regularly adopt this practice in their clinical protocols, these include dental care, neurology and oncology”.
It is quite shocking to realise that the Federal Board of Medicine restricts ozone therapy to experimental protocols in clinical trials, but the Ministry of Health states that the practice is already in use to treat neurological conditions and cancer.
In 2017, the then Senator (and former governor of the northern state of Rondonia) Valdir Raupp proposed a bill that, if approved, would authorize the practice in the country, effectively overruling the Board of Medicine. The bill has already been approved by the Senate and now waits for a vote in the Lower Chamber of Congress.
When an outbreak of mass psychogenic illness – caused by fear and stress related to vaccines – followed a vaccination campaign for HPV infection in another northern Brazilian state, Acre, proponents of ozone therapy tried to get the authorities to interrupt the vaccination and use ozone to treat the girls affected. Since then , the ties between pro-ozone and antivaxx movements in Brazil have strengthened.
Such an alliance is troubling, not least because the ozone lobby has shown an alarming level of access to public authorities, including senators, ministers and at least one mayor – that of Itajai. Vaccination coverage in Brazil has been dropping in recent years, mostly due to logistical difficulties, and an added layer of ideological fearmongering does not help.
Unlike anthroposophy, chiropractic, “energy” healing or homeopathy and other kinds of CAM, ozone therapy doesn’t depend on blatantly antiscientific principles, neither does it, in principle violate scientific laws.
The ozone molecule is made of three oxygen atoms linked together. The “common” oxygen molecule, that is essential for all multicellular life on Earth, has only two atoms. There are several modes of action proposed to try to explain why ozone therapy would be expected to work for something (there is no evidence that it does, though, for anything). One such purported reason is the ability of ozone to kill fungi, bacteria and destroy viruses (in vitro only – as has been correctly noted elsewhere bleach, soap and handguns also can kill microbes, in a lab dish), and there’s even a proposed “biochemical cascade” offered to “describe” the supposedly beneficial action of ozone in the blood.
Despite these scientific-sounding trappings, ozone therapy sits quite comfortably with the more extravagant varieties of CAM, and several of its proponents adopt their language, modes of discourse and beliefs without compunction. One publicity piece goes so far as to assert that since ozone produces “positive” ions, it is capable of neutralizing “negative” influences, such as viruses and parasites. The disingenuous conflation of the technical and metaphorical senses of “positive/negative” is an old trick from the CAM repertoire.
Alternative therapies and pseudoscientific beliefs seem to sprout from the same roots, defined by an absence of evidence and a hostility towards mainstream science. That such hostility expresses itself in antivaxxer rhetoric may be regrettable, but it should not be surprising.
What should be noted, though, is that here in Brazil this pseudoscientific network that promotes irrationality and magical thinking is well organized politically, cultivating friendly lawmakers and government officials. The scientific community, on the other hand, is scattered, disorganized and only comes together as a political entity when funding is under threat. Funding is essential for science, of course, but so is the ethos of respect for evidence. Brazilian scientists who ignore the corrosion of this principle do a disservice to themselves and to the society they serve.
The thing with conspiracy theories is that they go right to the top: the brain. Seeking out information which supports our pre-existing beliefs is what humans are good at, and these confirmation biases help fuel conspiracy theorising behaviour. Finding information which supports our suspicions and beliefs is a comforting behaviour, which is why we tend to reject conflicting information as less likely to be accurate and as from untrustworthy sources (even when it isn’t). The pattern seeking habits which are hard-wired into our brains make it easy for us to connect dots which aren’t connected and see motives and intentions where none truly exist. In some instances, this is harmless and will cause people to see faces in toast, but in the right (or wrong) circumstances it can have devastating consequences.
Belief in conspiracy theories often correlates with feelings of powerlessness and a perceived lack of control in one’s life. Conspiracy theories offer up a person or group to pinpoint as responsible for a secret plot or nefarious plan which allows an individual to feel as though they are regaining some control and order in the chaos. However, conspiracy belief doesn’t help thwart these anxieties in the long term as the theories don’t address the actual cause of the issues a person may be experiencing in their life. Subscribing to one conspiracy theory and accepting that someone is out to get them is likely to make an individual consider other conspiracy theories to be plausible too. As a result, a person’s level of mistrust rises, as do their anxieties about their perceived lack of control and power and the world around them, and so a vicious cycle ensues.
I live in the sleepy Wiltshire town of Bradford on Avon and recently I accidentally became caught up in a conspiracy myself. In response to the COVID-19 crisis, Bradford on Avon Town Council put a one-way road system in place and cordoned off parts of the road so pedestrians can socially distance while using the old, narrow pavements. This did not go down well with motorists and, according to some, was in fact a plot for some form of social domination and control by outside forces. My involvement? I’m an administrator for local Facebook groups, and along with my fellow administrators, I deleted threatening and slanderous comments that people made in the groups. As a result, it was claimed that we were complicit in silencing people who dissented, clearly at the order of the New World Order town council.
As one of “the admins” I noticed that during the UK lockdown the posting habits of group members shifted and there was a very obvious increase in the amount of misinformation being shared by people which they hadn’t fact checked. This inability to distinguish facts from fact-like fictions is partly due to a lack of critical thinking skills – which would allow an individual to analyse and fact-check information in a rational manner – exacerbated by the sheer volume of information a person is subjected to daily, much of which they probably don’t understand. The World Health Organisation refers to this as an Infodemic, described as ‘an over-abundance of information – some accurate and some not – that makes it hard for people to find trustworthy sources and reliable guidance when they need it.’
So, while furloughed from my full time job, I found my time taken up instead with fact checking the claims people were making in social media groups, deleting hoaxes and false claims all while urging people to fact check for themselves, and offering a list of ways in which they could. On several occasions, to refute the false claims being made in the groups, I shared links to academic studies which was met with responses like “I trust common sense more than universities”, “I don’t trust official sources”, “wake up”, and “they tell you what to think because they don’t want us to think for ourselves.”
At a time when the world is gripped by a viral pandemic which not only kills people at an alarming rate but is leaving survivors with serious health issues, this sort of sharing of misinformation and distrust of factual sources can have serious consequences. Especially as research has found that people who believe in false reporting and conspiracy theories about diseases are ‘less likely to behave in a way that would protect themselves and others, such as washing their hands frequently and keeping away from other people if they have any symptoms.’
Research conducted by Ipsos Mori for King’s College London also found that almost 60% of those who believe there’s no evidence that COVID-19 is real use Facebook to source the information on which they base such beliefs. Meanwhile 60% of those who believe the virus is linked to 5G radiation got their information from YouTube. Both platforms have rolled out responses to the spread of such potentially dangerous misinformation by users, while also collaborating with the World Health Organisation and the National Health Service to provide accurate information about COVID-19.
However, earlier this month, the Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) released a report which condemned the misinformation tackling efforts of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube after they found fewer than 1 in 20 reports of false or misleading information were dealt with by the platform. For example, CCDH researchers reported 569 posts by Facebook users which shared rule-breaking misinformation promoting anti-vaccination narratives. One example included the claim that the only way to catch a virus was to be “injected with one via a vaccine”. Only 14 of the reported posts were removed, and Facebook added warnings to just 19 others meaning the platform acted on less than 6% of the reports.
Yet, it’s also important to question whether deleting misleading posts is the most effective way of stemming the spread of this sort of misinformation. During the lockdown in the UK, social psychologist Dr Daniel Jolley was interviewed on The Guardian’s ‘Science Weekly’ podcast about the psychology of conspiracy theories. Jolley suggested that by deleting misleading posts about subjects like Coronavirus and 5G, platforms such as Facebook and YouTube could risk playing into the narrative of conspiracy theorists who may see such reactions as proof of a cover-up. Just as I experienced when deleting Facebook posts made by others about the social distancing efforts in my town. Jolley suggests that allowing conversations about conspiracy ideas to happen openly could be the right move, but in a way which makes clear that the claims made are not factual.
For example, inoculation interventions which offer pre-emptive warnings about subsequently viewed misinformation have been shown to reduce the persuasiveness of the misinformation. While research in the US and India has shown that helping people to develop their digital literacy by teaching them critical thinking skills and how to spot fake information can improve their ability to fact-check information they encounter online, while elsewhere researchers found that communicating fact-based information about the risks posed by infectious diseases, such as Measles, can be a more effective way of countering anti-vaccination beliefs and arguments compared to directly countering and debunking anti-vaccination conspiracies.
Ultimately, human biases make us all susceptible to conspiracy theorising. There is scope for social media platforms to do more to counter the sharing of misinformation by their users – especially that which leads to violence or promotes dangerous health claims. Some are calling for government interventions to make social media companies legally obliged to step up their game on this front. Whether this happens or not, it’s clear that the key is finding the right evidence-based approaches to take when tackling conspiracy theorising to ensure the most effective outcome in helping people stay informed.
Why do people turn to alternative medicine? Reams have been written on the subject but it seems to boil down to a few key factors: patients want to be seen as more than a collection of symptoms and want to feel in control of their care, particularly when dealing with chronic conditions. The focus on “evidence-based medicine”, while one skeptics understandably enthusiastically support, can often have an unfortunate side-effect of forgetting about the patient, “devaluing” their agenda in comparison to the agendas of researchers and practitioners. Patients want to feel seen and heard, to be treated individually and holistically in a way that allows them to form an “alliance” with their doctors to improve their wellbeing.
As a society, we assume that alternative practitioners provide these individualised, holistic, treatments because it’s what such practitioners are constantly telling us. But do they? As skeptics we are unlikely to be in a position to compare conventional and complementary treatments, but last year I had cause to take the plunge and enter the world of chiropractic. My sister had been suffering from severe back pain and her doctor had been less than helpful – they had been stereotypically dismissive of her pain and the huge negative impact it was having on her health and wellbeing. In desperation she turned to a local chiropractor and my skeptical alarm sounded. I didn’t know much about chiropractic beyond what I learned during the now-infamous libel case between Simon Singh and the British Chiropractic Association (BCA) back in 2010.
Instead, I visited the same chiropractic clinic. I was given an assessment lasting half an hour (far longer than I’ve ever got from an NHS doctor), was invited to a free half-hour talk, and then had another half-hour session where we went through my ‘report’ and discussed treatment options. It was all very welcoming and seemed to be doing everything that alternative medicine promises – it provided long appointments that gave me the opportunity to discuss all my problems rather than rush through them; I was invited to talks to further inform me about the background to chiropractic; and I was given a personalised report and treatment plan.
While there is much that can be said about all the steps on this process (and I have), I want to focus here on the supposedly individualised nature of all of this. From my experience at the clinic, and the subsequent free “spinal check-up” I attended recently, the individualised nature of these treatments are massively overstated. It was this fact, more than anything else I discussed, that helped convince my sister not to waste her hard-earned money on these treatments, and I want to explain how this worked in the hopes of helping others.
My sister visited the chiropractor for debilitating back and leg pain (later diagnosed as sciatica) that left her in agonised tears. I visited as a “birthday treat”. I had a few aches and pains – a dead arm in the mornings and generalised stiffness – but nothing too major and nothing that I couldn’t live with. We had two very different sets of symptoms, with two very different levels of impact on our lives. Yet despite this, when comparing notes we discovered we had exactly the same series of tests and were provided with exactly the same treatment plan. When I went back recently my original aches and pains had disappeared, to be replaced by some new ones (oh the joys of middle age!), yet I was given the exact same set of tests and offered the exact same treatment plan.
In fact, the treatment plan is so generic that the company offers payment plans built around it. You can bulk-purchase 12 or 24 sessions at a time, each lasting 15 minutes, although it was emphasised that only a small portion of this would be active treatment, the rest was for “relaxation”.
Chiropractic likes to compare itself to dentistry. The comparison was even made in the talk I attended, and it can be found on chiropractic websites all over the internet. It is the result of a model proposed in 2005 to enable “the chiropractic profession to establish cultural authority and increase market share of the public seeking chiropractic care”. The aim is to make people see going to the chiropractor as something routine and regular. The most obvious difference between dentists and chiropractors is that dentists only expect you to visit once a year if you have no concerns, whereas chiropractors expect much more frequent visits.
But the comparison fails even more when you look at the supposed ‘individualised’ treatments for problems. If I went to the dentist with a superficially chipped tooth I’d expect a very different treatment plan than if I had periodontitis. This simply does not happen with chiropractic: it doesn’t matter if you’ve merely over-exerted yourself in the garden or if you have slipped a disc, the treatment plan is the same – see them twice a week for three months, then reassess and move to once a week or a fortnight for another three months and reassess again. This is not remotely individualised, and simply would not fly in any legitimate health intervention.
My aches and pains got better. The NHS doctor said I had carpal tunnel and would most likely sort itself out; they were right. My sister’s back (fortunately) has also got better. Sciatica often does. Had we followed the advice of the chiropractor, both of us could have spent hundreds on treatment that would have appeared effective because we got better, even though we got better anyway. Chiropractic relies on this regression to the mean, and takes credit for it. But more than that it claims to be individualised while giving the most generic and impersonal treatment I’ve ever received from a medical practitioner. I was seen as nothing more than the nerves in my back, all of which were just waiting to cause me problems. It was not holistic, I was not ‘seen and heard’, and the only result, had I pursued treatment, would not have been reduced pain but a reduced bank balance.
