21st Century mass hysteria. Thanks to social networks this shit spreads fast the left over intelligence apparatus of the Soviet Empire has figured out how to weaponize it pretty well.
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You’re right. I misread it.
I went back to their page and the table does say white people are 3.3x less likely to believe in Qanon (not more), but that doesn’t match the raw data they give. The actual percent of white respondents that believe in Q is not lower than non-white, so basically its bullshit stats.
The “odds ratios” are just the result of a funky logistic regression and shouldn’t be taken seriously. Basically the claim from their statistical model is that if everyone were equally likely to watch the same news, belong to the same political party, etc. then white people would be less likely to be Qnuts. But that is an irrelevant statistical claim because those aren’t actual independent factors
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That makes sense; I wasn’t following what they meant by “race, party, ideology, and religious affiliation are also in the model.”
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If it makes you feel better, “doubter” is the label they gave to those who said they “mostly disagree.” Whereas those that “mostly agree” were labeled believers. So it was worded to make support look higher
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Thanks, slightly less terrifying, maybe, but anyone who can’t see that “child sex prisons on Mars” is utter bullshit deserve very little credit in my book.
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When you consider how many people believe in astrology, ghosts, UFOs = aliens, creationism, homeopathy, Gwyneth Paltrow, etc., etc., I don’t find this surprising. Just sad to see it confirmed yet again.
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maybe just the attempt to empathize and understand why people might believe stuff like this?
i almost feel like everyone can agree on things like: a few companies have an outsized and negative influence on the world.
but some subset ( like q-anon ) believe that’s literally the devil’s work – evil human beings, and probably (insert non-white race here) cabals of them. and if you just get rid of the devil ( or non-white “races” ) all will be well.
while another ( hopefully larger group ) believes that all humans are roughly capable of these actions, and that things like law, policy, the light of day, and maybe non-violent direct action can constraint them. but maybe feel like they are blocked by the first subset who want accumulate power to “fix” things their way instead.
anyway – i feel like there’s a deeper root than the conspiracy theory of the day. and trying to understand a little bit of that motivation feels sometimes like all i can do ( or have any control over. )
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Yep. Bad dataviz layout, to be sure.
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I thought the “Lizardman constant” (people who will say they believe that the world is run by evil alien lizards in human suits) is supposed to be 15%, which suggests that fewer people find Q credible than a world ruled by evil alien lizards.
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You don’t believe in Gwyneth Paltrow?
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I’ve never been polled on surveys like this. Has anyone here?
I can totally see this. There is nothing about being a Democrat that stops you from believing in unfounded conspiracy theories.
I can imagine a Bernie supporter who does a lot of drugs and listens to Joe Rogan thinking “The only reason why Berine didn’t get the nomination was Satan worshiping pedos backing Hillary and I might as well hope that Trump will revel the truth to everyone”. All the while actively ignoring the bits they disagree with.
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I got a call from Gallup just before the 2012 election. That was in the olden days when we weren’t deluged with fake phone calls all day long.
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I believe Qcumber is the preferred term.
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Who does?
Ah, you also know Doug? We’re all a bit worried about Doug.
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Or I look at the left chart and see 60% of Americans at least dabbling in Q conspiracy. That’s not exactly a comforting statistic, and if you look at the poll questions the deep comfort in conspiracy and misinformation is a problem.
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This, basically.
I’m a professor. Surveys ARE a scourge. they’re an annoyance; they rely on questions worded to elicit straight-up easy “yes or no”, “1 to 5” answers to complex problems that make people go, “I can’t answer that in the given track!”; the questions bring their agenda in - not even as a trojan horse, but more like a big spotlight with fireworks on top; they can’t even really work without making obvious assumptions, and when the other side goes, “wait, I don’t agree with that wording” you get "well, then “I don’t know” is your option!; they drone on forever after you started them; and then there’s that naive survey tendency to believe people have something like a “stable opinion”, as if that wasn’t contextually fluid depending on what we are doing right now… opinions aren’t a-holes, because we all usually have just one of those, and it doesn’t change much from situation to situation (shh! NO!). opinions are more like lego pieces, you pick them out of a bag depending on what you want to do with them.
I tell my students that surveys, as they are done now, are basically very expensive and flashy random number generators. People will just click anything to get it over with, troll it, resist-answer, and even if they’re being forthright, they’re being asked things they really can’t answer that easily and are left confused, just throwing SOME answer in to get on with the thing. It’s a lost cause by now.
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yes, exactly. The specific claims are beyond absurd, taken literally; but taken poetically, you can find absolutely understandable meaning (which, btw, is true for people we call “crazy” across the board; that was a famous insight in critical psychiatry, but I digress).
The world as it is, and the power structures in it, are beyond horrible; a view that places literal monsters at the center of it is, poetically, understandable. I have a student who’s analyzing a tik tok trend, shift tok, this way: people making videos being “from an alternate reality”. The boomer view is, these kids are crazy; but no, they’re “I wish for another world”-videos, and that’s the most rational thing I can think of. I’ve written a little thing on the “Giant Meteor 2016/2020: just end it all” election bumper stickers. It’s all the same sentiment, in effect.
Also, what gets little traction in the entire thing is that moral panic structures in media economies are geared towards this horrible logic of seriousness: they have no sense of irony, trolling (the jester kind), satire in these things. The seeds of QAnon in Pizzagate were subversive and, dare I say, critical (no, no, not like that; give me a second.). People forget this: There was an email leak from through wikileaks, which exposed the nasty, bullying, power-abusing machinations behind the scenes of the DNC, the coordinated assault on Bernie Sanders’ candidacy, which was to be hidden in public view. Then, people who were having ironic fun with it on 4chan looked through it to -playfully- find more evidence of coverups and conspiracies; when “cheese pizza” was translated into human trafficking in a pizzeria’s basement, it wasn’t serious, initally. it was a subversive play on the actual, real conspiracies exposed.
And, because it was 4chan, its further aim was to expose how easily mass media can be coaxed into hysterical moral panics (someone google oprah and jemken…).And it succeeded, because of course it did, because the mass media IS ridiculous. And then, through that, more and more credulous people started taking it seriously, and it developed this scary life of its own. And the mass media blame the “dark corners of the internet” for it, without ever being able to realize that, in so many ways, it was THEM that gave it fuel and “washed” it in “serious wash” in the first place, and fed the bumpkins back into this space.
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It’s why I don’t watch news or listen to most things on the radio unless it’s music. Modern news, especially due to Fox News, has become this angry and paranoid landscape. It’s hard to find any just BORING news that just states some facts with little bias (there’s always bias, even just omissions are a bias). It doesn’t sell so it doesn’t get made all that often. I believe if there’s anything I would suggest anyone to learn and that is information hygiene. Know what’s being said, find out if it’s true (sources), and sometimes it’s better to not know than to know if the news itself is built to make you think a certain way about it without it being open about that.
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