If just a few years ago someone had publicly claimed that a global elite was holding kidnapped children captive and torturing them to obtain a rejuvenating drug from their blood, they would have been encouraged to seek psychiatric treatment immediately. Today, according to a British survey, around ten percent of all US citizens call themselves supporters of this idiotic conspiracy story called QAnon.
The movement has also arrived in Germany: According to the Amadeu Antonio Foundation, there are 150,000 QAnon followers in this country – this makes Germany one of the largest communities outside of the English-speaking world. Overall, according to a study by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, around a third of Germans seem to be open to conspiracy myths. If you factor out the children under the age of 14, that is around 24 million people. Other studies come to similar results. What they also discover: There are many connections between QAnon supporters, Corona deniers and right-wing extremists.
The nonsense is just a few clicks away
But how can blatant nonsense spread so widely in an enlightened world? After all, we live in the 21st century and not in the Middle Ages. The answer is obvious: Because this nonsense is only a few mouse clicks away. Social networks in particular are a reservoir for misinformation and conspiracy myths.
DW Editor Martin Muno
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The research center “Correctiv” comes to the conclusion in a data analysis that Facebook and Youtube are the platforms on which the most potential false information was disseminated in the past year. These are also spread via messenger services such as Telegram or WhatsApp. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) found that it takes around six times longer to reach 1,500 people with true information than with false information.
The big social platforms in particular are currently in a quandary: On the one hand, they take the term freedom of expression very broadly, including misinformation and even mobbing and insults. Facebook, for example, even refused until October 2020 to remove the denial of the Holocaust, which is punishable in 18 countries worldwide, from its pages.
Social media: the danger is recognized
On the other hand, after the presidential election in the US and at the latest after the storming of the masses incited by Donald Trump on the Capitol, social media recognized the danger posed by misinformation and hatred.
If individual platforms now block the accounts of prominent and less prominent people, if they provide obvious false information with warnings, if they try to hold users accountable, that can only be a start.
Two things have to happen: On the one hand, Facebook & Co. have to be made more liable for hate postings and fake news. The European Commission is currently trying to do this with the “Digital Services Act”. This is not an easy thing because the dividing line between containment of hoax and censorship is extremely thin. Still, it needs to be addressed.
Strengthen media literacy
On the other hand, media skills must be strengthened because young people in particular are more likely to find out more about social media than traditional ones. (The traditional media, on the other hand, are called upon to develop program formats with which one can better reach the “Generation YouTube”.)
Tackling conspiracy myths is urgent and important. We recently saw in Washington that they have the potential to destroy democracies. This week Marina Weisband drew attention to this in her speech on Holocaust Remembrance Day in the German Bundestag when she said that one must understand “that anti-Semitism does not begin where a synagogue is shot at. That the Shoah did not begin with gas chambers. It begins with conspiracy tales. “
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