There may well be a Thread which this post would fit in but here it is for now. Researchers using old and modern tools analyse the reasons for belief in Conspiracy Theories.
Why people believe Covid conspiracy theories: could folklore hold the answer?
Researchers use AI – and witchcraft folklore – to map the coronavirus conspiracy theories that have sprung up
Anna Leach and
Miles Probyn
Tue 26 Oct 2021 08.00 BST
Researchers have mapped the web of connections underpinning coronavirus conspiracy theories, opening a new way of understanding and challenging them.
Using Danish witchcraft folklore as a model, the researchers from UCLA and Berkeley analysed thousands of social media posts with an artificial intelligence tool and extracted the key people, things and relationships.
The tool enabled them to piece together the underlying stories in coronavirus conspiracy theories from fragments in online posts. One discovery from the research identifies
Bill Gates as the reason why conspiracy theorists connect 5G with the virus. With Gates’ background in computer technology and vaccination programmes, he served as a shortcut for these storytellers to link the two.
Gates is a persistent figure in the anti-vaccine stories. “He’s a great villain,” says the folklorist Prof Timothy Tangherlini one of the authors of the research. It’s Gates’ world-spanning influence in tech and then health that lodges him at the heart of a lot of conspiracies.
“Bill Gates is in Africa, he’s in everybody’s house because everybody’s got computers, and then he’s pushing these vaccines.”
Folklore isn’t just a model for the AI. Tangherlini, whose specialism is Danish folklore, is interested in how conspiratorial witchcraft folklore took hold in the 16th and 17th centuries and what lessons it has for today.
Whereas in the past, witches were accused of using herbs to create potions that caused miscarriages, today we see stories that Gates is using coronavirus vaccinations to sterilise people. A version of this story that omits Gates but claims the vaccines have caused men’s testicles to swell, making them infertile, was
repeated by the American rapper Nicki Minaj.
The research also hints at a way of breaking through conspiracy theory logic, offering a glimmer of hope as increasing numbers of people get drawn in.
The diagram below is a small section of the anti-vaccine stories that the researchers found. ...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/n...iracy-theories-could-folklore-hold-the-answer