What It Means to ‘Do Your Own Research’
How the digital age enables extremist thinking
Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic. (Frank Herbert, “Dune”)
The most efficient fiction of Nazi propaganda was the story of a Jewish world conspiracy. (Hannah Arendt, “The Origins of Totalitarianism”)
I see it more and more in the comments sections on social media: the exhortation to “do your own research.” The call to question not just authority, but everything that‘s presented to you as fact. To wake up. To refuse the blue pill of complacence and ignorance and follow the White Rabbit instead, like Neo in The Matrix. To start preparing.
The trumpet call is coming from the online movement QAnon, a miasma of conspiracy theories and end-of-days prophecies, which originated in the US but metastized to Europe, too. Here in Germany, where I live, one of its offshoots is called Querdenken, or thinking outside the box. (I would laugh if I could.)
So what do we need to wake up and prepare for? Who or what is boxing us in?
Depending on who you ask, and where you ask, you will get slightly different answers, but the overarching narrative is more or less the same, whether in the UK, Germany, France or the USA.
Apparently, there’s a Storm brewing. In fact, we are now living in what is believed to be the calm before the storm. After the Storm, the Great Awakening will come. At least that‘s what the anonymous prophet known as “Q” tells us.
And then, of course, there’s the coronavirus hoax, which is just the global cabal’s ploy to implant tracking chips into all of us, via compulsory mass vaccination.
The destruction of the global cabal is imminent (Q prophecy)
There is a series of different, often contradictory ideas simmering in this toxic pot. None of them are new, and the anti-Semitic one, about a global conspiracy of Jews, has been around for roughly 200 years.
The Storm is taken to be the approaching purge of a ring of child abusers in powerful positions, who traffic children in their free time, and otherwise run the world as part of the global cabal. Donald Trump, an outsider to this cabal, is working hard to dismantle it. The terminology echoes that of Nazi indoctrination efforts and Hitler’s rants about a “plutocracy.”
These people need to ALL be ELIMINATED (“Q”)
QAnon welcomes everyone, and is itself very welcome in certain circles.
Various bands of white brothers in the U.S., armed to the teeth, with inspired and inspiring names such as Boogaloo and Proud Boys, have crawled out of the woodwork and embraced QAnon. Their working theory is that the Storm refers to an upcoming race war.
For them, the Black Lives Matter protests and marches in the wake of the killing of George Floyd were a godsend. The violent events in Kenosha, Wisconsin, illustrate this perfectly.
Also in the U.S., many Evangelical Christians think that these are the end times and Q is a prophet of the Apocalypse. They like that Q often quotes from the Bible, and feel empowered by the foreknowledge that Q bestows upon them. This group expects the Great Awakening to be primarily a spiritual event.
It’s not a theory. It’s the foretelling of things to come. (Shelley Uscinski, QAnon adherent)
In Germany, the Querdenken 711 movement has arisen in Stuttgart (711 is the area code for the city) during this year as a reaction to lockdown measures imposed by the government to battle the Covid-19 pandemic, which Querdenkers consider to be a hoax and a global conspiracy. Their website states that they’re a pro-democracy initiative with no room for extremists of any kind.
Querdenkers have apparently been so traumatized by having to wear a mask for 20 minutes when they’re out shopping that they compare themselves to Anne Frank and Sophie Scholl, victims of Nazi persecution. This, ironically, while marching mask-free alongside neo-Nazis and other right-wing extremists in protest of the government’s Covid-19 strategy, and calling for Donald Trump to liberate them.
Not only are their personal liberties under attack, but the government is also in cahoots with Bill Gates and plans to use the current pandemic to sterilize a large part of the population through forced mass inoculation. Plus, you‘re gonna get chipped to boot.
Talk about cognitive overload.
For people who engage in conspiracy thinking, a global pandemic of uncertain origin is the best thing that could’ve happened, because it proves the existence of a secretive group working to control our lives through wars, terrorist attacks, financial collapses, and epidemics.
Interestingly, not all QAnon followers describe themselves as conspiracy theorists. Dave Hayes, one of the oracles in Q’s temple, says on his lucrative YouTube channel that he considers himself to be a “Q researcher.” Conspiracies are “not his thing.”
Hayes, a paramedic who goes by the handle PrayingMedic, is either selective in his definitions of research and theory, or he doesn’t know what either word means.
Either way, by naming himself a researcher, he’s staking a claim to legitimacy backed by verifiable facts: he’s not peddling snake oil, or saying that JFK’s son was assassinated by Hillary Clinton — he’s working on uncovering the truth.
The QAnon motto, instead of ‘Where We Go One We Go All’ (WWG1WGA), should perhaps be ‘Do Your Own Research’ (DYOR).
What the “research” most often boils down to, though, is watching videos that someone else created. Fact-checking or looking into where the video might have originated from is unnecessary, plus you’d need to actually be familiar with source-checking techniques. You know, like actual journalists and researchers are.
Reading would be too much work, and take much longer, while video synthesizes this vast array of written information into little data mcnuggets that are so much easier to ingest and process.
All this inane paranoid babble would be easy to dismiss if it didn’t have real-life repercussions. The potential dangers of posing as a researcher are perhaps best summed up by the FBI’s memo declaring QAnon a domestic terror threat:
… conspiracy theories stoke the threat of extremist violence, especially when individuals “claiming to act as ‘researchers’ or ‘investigators’ single out people, businesses, or groups which they falsely accuse of being involved in the imagined scheme.
The appeal of QAnon is precisely that its vague tenets and pronouncements allow for dozens of different interpretations, so virtually anyone can find a thread to latch onto. That’s why its appeal actually “crosses ideological lines,” as the conspiracy expert Joseph Uscinski explains.
In other words, you don’t need to be on the far right or the far left to feel like you belong in the movement — it’s enough if you’re open to conspiracy thinking.
This also accounts for QAnon’s transatlantic success. There are no properly armed militias, and fewer Christian fundamentalists in Europe, but there is plenty of xenophobia, racism, and vague discontent. The European far right has happily jumped on the QAnon wagon, but so have ordinary citizens, some celebrities, and even a few scientists.
The sudden influx of millions of refugees into Europe in 2015 revived the supremacist Great Replacement theory, according to which white Europeans are being gradually replaced with non-white non-Europeans through mass migration and subsequent demographic growth. Openly xenophobic initiatives and far-right political organizations started mobilizing across the Continent in response.
Germany was the only European country to throw its doors wide open during the refugee crisis. The negative reception of immigrants and refugees in a significant part of the population, however, emboldened various far-right groups, which until then had been operating on the fringe.
As the work of counter-extremism researchers Julia Ebner and Jacob Davey showed, social media played a deciding role at the time in the advent of the far right across Europe by enabling cross-border networking and organization, as well as cooperation with counterparts in the U.S. It also amplified their messages by creating the illusion of important and interesting content.
Manipulating computational systems in ways that maximise the reach of content and elevate a topic’s perceived importance is fairly easy. For example, the ‘trending topics’ functions on Facebook and Twitter allow individuals and groups to create the impression of widespread public interest in a topic or content regardless of its accuracy or intent. (J. Ebner, “Going Dark”)
The rise of QAnon in Germany followed the same pattern as in the US, in that it was embraced by a number of existing organizations on the far-right spectrum, such as the troll farm Reconquista Germanica, which influenced the 2017 German elections.
QAnons have demonstrated considerable ideological (and logical) flexibility in their attempts to tailor their tales to different audiences. They have co-opted the Yellow Vest demonstrations and boosted hardline Brexit campaigns and Tommy Robinson protests. By injecting their conspiratorial narratives into these movements, they can leverage already existing networks and impact their political direction. (J. Ebner)
In other words, there was plenty of fertile ground already in place for QAnon to be able to cross the ocean.
The early days of the Internet and of digital technologies, when people were only slowly starting to comprehend their potential, was a time of great excitement. In his 1995 book The Road Ahead, Bill Gates talked about a future Internet which would look like an “information superhighway.”
Few people at the time could imagine what that entailed, and as with all new things we get excited about, few thought about the larger ramifications of having information move faster than people, or any other commodity.
But what we’ve come to understand and accept in the last few years is that the Internet is actually a double-edged sword. By making information available to everyone and eliminating its traditional gatekeepers (academia and media elites), as well as allowing people to organize and collaborate at a grassroots level, the Internet can be a great tool for democracy and learning. (I’ve written more extensively about this here.)
In fact, when talking about the potential of digital technologies, the educator and researcher Michael Peters insists on the importance of this “collective intelligence” assembled on the Internet in creating “knowledge cultures” based on freedom of inquiry.
And yet, as we have witnessed, the flip side of this digital utopia is also collective paranoia which manifests in widespread conspiracy thinking that creates what we can call ‘misinformation cultures.’
Technically, the Internet is supposed to give everyone equal access to the same information. As such, it’s indeed meant to be the vehicle of a knowledge culture characterized by the freedom to ask questions — one of the basic tenets of an open, democratic culture.
In reality, “proprietary” algorithms, owned by Big Tech companies, determine which information is going to be presented to you next after your initial search and click. This at least partly explains how two people researching the term “Holocaust,” for instance, can end up with two different search outcomes, one of which is that the Holocaust was a hoax.
Studies have found that the internet is not just conducive to the rapid spread of tales and hoaxes but also fuels conspiracy-theory logic and culture. First, it democratises knowledge, thereby empowering internet citizens to conduct their own research and open-source intelligence investigations — even if they have no knowledge of source-checking techniques. Second, the online information overload encourages cognitive filtering and pattern recognition processes that distort reality. (J. Ebner, “Going Dark”)
Researcher Shoshana Zuboff says that the digital age is no longer “about what we can earn, but about what we can learn.” As soon as a class of people who own and control the flow of information is created, social inequality increases. In fact, Zuboff calls this “epistemic inequality” — unequal access to knowledge.
QAnon can thus be viewed as a product of the clash between a free culture of inquiry, which encourages independent research and thinking, and a culture of digital surveillance instigated by Big Tech, which monitors user behavior through “cookies,” to then channel it via algorithms.
The end result is that, as a global society, we cannot agree anymore on what constitutes a reality that we all share. By turning information into property and harvesting it for profit, Big Tech has played a crucial role in allowing digital technologies to split our world in two: we now have a world of facts, and a world of alternative facts.
Reality is no longer defined through shared offline experiences and dialogue, but increasingly through isolated online engagement with customized content that reflects your individual preferences and tastes.
These are the basic preconditions for the rise of conspiracy and extremist thinking in public discourse.
The architecture of social media platforms plays into the hands of extreme fringe groups by pushing users towards sensationalist content. (Julia Ebner)
If you believe that a small group of people secretly runs the planet — or even if you’re open to the idea but not entirely convinced — and you happen to click on content dealing with this idea, the algorithm running your social media is going to continue to feed you similar content, thereby reinforcing its message(s) and deepening the extent of your engagement.
We now know that the Internet, instead of being the great equalizer, actually enables what researchers Adrienne LeFrance and Julia Ebner call, respectively, “the warping of shared reality” and “collaborative fiction creation.”
And that’s exactly what QAnon is: a fiction factory where tens of thousands of people work together, and yet alone, online, ‘researching’ and collecting ‘evidence’ in support of a theory that explains everything — a theory that holds what Hannah Arendt calls “the key to history, or the solution for all the ‘riddles of the universe’.”
This reveals the darkest side of the digital age: it has replicated the necessary preconditions for “social atomization and extreme individualization” that Arendt identified in 1951 as being precursors to the rise of mass movements before WW2, such as Fascism, Communism, and Nazism.
In contrast to a hundred years ago, however, today’s “atomized, isolated individual” is able to forge connections with other isolated individuals literally without ever leaving their house or showing their face. There’s no need to wear a uniform or badge, or pledge an oath of loyalty, though some extremist online organizations do reflect military hierarchies. Still, your engagement and dedication can be demonstrated purely through online work.
Community is now found online, and the relationships built within this new framework replace traditional ones with family members, neighbors, and friends. There are countless stories on the Internet of rifts between family members because one of them has moved their entire life online in pursuit of, say, Q’s “crumbs,” to the detriment of every pre-existing relationship.
These online communities also bring with them a redefinition of what is real and what makes sense. This paves the way for atomized, isolated individuals to become more easily radicalized. And as we have seen, some of them take matters into their own hands in mosques, synagogues, and churches around the world, leaving badly written online manifestos.
The impression some of us might’ve had of QAnon as a purely online phenomenon has meanwhile become untenable. QAnon followers are actively shaping the world around us: they’re winning seats in democratic elections, and organizing propaganda networks on mobile apps which serve to indoctrinate followers by spreading misinformation.
Put simply, QAnon has left the dark corners of the Internet where it originated to become a mass offline movement.
So is there anything that can be done to counteract the poison spread by online conspiracy movements?
While QAnon was declared a domestic terror threat by the FBI already last year, German government officials were slower to take their homegrown offshoots seriously.
As I was finishing this text, however, the domestic intelligence service BfV, tasked with protecting the German Constitution, finally confirmed that they were keeping a close eye on the Querdenken movement, especially because members of various extreme right groups are known to have infiltrated their ranks.
This is good news, but it’s not enough. The digital age has enabled extremist networks to grow across both time and geographical distance, as well as to force their talking points from fringe platforms into the mainstream media. Responding on a national level doesn’t even begin to put out the fire when the issue has long crossed national borders.
As Ebner argues, it’s vital that there be a coordinated, strong international response to the white supremacist agenda. She proposes several measures, but I will highlight two that I think are critical:
1. Expand the definition of terrorism so that it’s “ideologically agnostic.” We need to stop thinking of terrorism purely in terms of jihadi networks, and include far-right organizations on the terrorist spectrum.
2. Political actors and government officials need to strongly, consistently and uniformly condemn any political talk that “legitimizes or even endorses conspiracy theories” and far-right propaganda, or, conversely, minimalizes it and doesn’t take it seriously.
Why? Make no mistake, conspiracy theorists and white supremacists, no matter what they may say to the contrary, are not interested in democracy and its institutions, nor do they want to protect the democratic state they happen to live in.
As individuals, I would argue that one thing we can do, which would be quite effective in combating misinformation and far-right propaganda, is to work on improving our digital literacy. If we don’t know how to vet the information presented to us, and just endlessly repost it, we amplify content without taking any responsibility for what we share.
It’s about time we realized that being a citizen in a democracy is no longer just about voting in local and state elections, but also about learning your rights, and your duties, as a digital citizen.
Bibliography:
Adrienne LeFrance, “The Prophecies of Q.” The Atlantic, June 2020 issue
Shoshana Zuboff. “You are now remotely controlled.” The New York Times, January 24, 2020
Julia Ebner. “Stop the online conspiracy theorists before they break democracy.” The Guardian, 18 February 2019
Julia Ebner, Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists (2020)
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951; 1958)
P. Jandric, Learning in the Age of Digital Reason (2017)
