11
votes
I was a teenage conspiracy theorist: Want to know why wild conspiracism can be so irresistible? Ask a fourteen-year-old girl
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- Title
- I Was a Teenage Conspiracy Theorist
- Authors
- Ellen Cushing
- Published
- May 13 2020
- Word count
- 3974 words
This was an excellent article with lots of great insight.
I've shared on here how my students love conspiracy theory videos on YouTube. In January and February, long before our pandemic closures, my students and even some of my coworkers talked about how the coronavirus was a hoax, an overblown news story crafted to make Trump look bad in an election year, or a Chinese bio-weapon fabricated in a lab. I did a lot of "misinformation whack-a-mole" with this, generally by asking them questions, but it doesn't really get me or them anywhere. The conspiracies simply have an allure that more boring or demotivating truths don't.
That's a tough line to walk, as if I go on an overt offensive they're more likely than not to just shut me out. In a world of "sides", if I position myself as opposed to them I lose my seat at the table, so I always try to come across in a way that's helpful, supportive, and acting in their best interests. They need to have trust in me, and it's easy to compromise that if I try to willfully tear down all the things they believe in.
I've found that direct counters don't seem to hold much weight and are often counterproductive, but asking them questions like "How do you know you can trust that source?" or "Does that person have anything to gain from lying to you?" gets them thinking a bit more, much like you suggest. In the moment it rarely turns tides, but I like to think of it more as a nudge toward more critical thinking down the road.
I think part of my frustration is less that I'm not having an immediate impact and more that I don't ever get to know the magnitude of my impact. Like most of teaching, I won't see the true results of what I do until much later, if ever. Most of what I do, in the short time I'm a significant presence for my students, is laying the foundation for lives that I will never see lived. My students will go on next year without me, shuffled to a new set of adults who will lay more foundation, all while they are getting older and wiser and gaining agency and independence using the skills, information, and values they've absorbed from us and every other influence in their lives. Anything I do to counter misinformation is less about what a student believes right now -- when they're young and not yet fully independent agents -- and more about what direction they're headed in and what they do moving forward into adulthood.
I'd like to think I'm having a positive impact, but the truth is I don't and can't really know. I have to just operate on hope instead, but when faced with an increasingly hostile and truthless internet that weilds so much more influence than just little old me, that hope can be hard to hold onto.