Korey Rowe served in Iraq and Afghanistan and returned to the United States traumatized and disillusioned in 2004. His experiences abroad and persistent questions about 9/11 convinced him. that U.S. leaders lied about what happened that day and the wars that followed.
The result was “Loose Change,” a 2005 documentary produced by Rowe and written and directed by his childhood friend Dylan Avery, which popularized the theory that the U.S. government was behind the 11- S. It was one of the first viral hits of the then young internet and motivated millions to question what they were told.
The attacks united many Americans in their pain and anger, but “Loose Change” addressed the discontented.
“It was the lightning rod that caught the lightning,” Rowe recalls. He hoped the documentary would lead to a serious reconsideration of the attacks. Rowe, who lives in Oneonta, New York, does not regret the documentary and still questions the events of 9/11, but says he is deeply concerned about what the 9/11 conspiracy theories revealed. on the corrosive nature of misinformation on the Internet.
Twenty years later, skepticism and suspicion first revealed by 9/11 conspiracy theories have turned into cancer, spread on the Internet, and been fueled by experts and politicians like Donald Trump. One deception has emerged after another, each stranger than the previous one: that former President Barack Obama was not born in the United States. Pizzagate. QAnon.
“Look at where he’s gotten: he has people storming the Capitol because they think the election was a scam. He has people who aren’t going to be vaccinated and he’s dying in hospitals,” Rowe says. “We’ve gotten to the point where the information is actually killing people.”
There were, of course, conspiracy theories before 9/11: the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the shooting, the alleged crash of a UFO in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. And the Country’s interest in alternative and marginal theories was on the rise before 9/11, exemplified by the 1990s series “The X-Files”, with its slogans “The X-Files”. truth is out there ”and“ Don’t trust anyone ”. But it was September 11 that proclaimed our current era of suspicion and disbelief, and revealed the ability of the internet to catalyze conspiracy theories.
“Conspiracy theories have always been with us, and the only thing that has changed is the means to share them,” says Karen Douglas, a professor of psychology at the University of Kent in England, who studies why people believe in such explanations. “The Internet has made conspiracy theories more visible and easier to share than ever before. People can also quickly find others with similar ideas, join groups, and share their opinions.”
Conspiracy theories about the attack and its aftermath also gave early exposure to some of the same people promoting unfounded deceptions and claims about COVID-19, vaccines and the 2020 election, including Alex Jones, the Infowars editor who supports Trump, who has accused the United States of planning the attacks and said the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting was a hoax. Jones co-produced the third edition of “Loose Change.”
Polls show that belief in 9/11 conspiracy theories peaked in the years immediately following the attack and then declined. Subsequent polls show that a small percentage of Americans still have doubts about the official explanation for the attacks.
Not surprisingly, these views persist, or have declined over time. Shocking and sudden events often generate conspiracy theories as people collectively struggle to understand them, says Mark Fenster, a law professor at the University of Florida who has studied the history of conspiracy theories. conspiracy in the United States.
“A plane crashing into the World Trade Center? What crashes into the Pentagon? Sounds like something out of a movie,” Fenster says. “It just didn’t look like a real event; and it’s when you have a huge anomalous event, like this, that conspiracy theories sometimes come up.”
Before the Internet, conspiracy theorists relied on books, pamphlets, and the occasional nightly television program to defend their beliefs. Now, they can exchange theories on message boards like Reddit, post videos on YouTube, and win new conversions on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.
The first known conspiracy theory of 9/11 came just hours after the attack, when a U.S. computer software engineer emailed a post to an Internet forum where he questioned whether the towers were demolished by a controlled detonation.
Twenty years later, a search on YouTube for 9/11-related content releases millions of results.
Thousands of videos focus on conspiracy theories. That’s a lot, but the grandfather of modern conspiracy theories has been overtaken by newcomers: a Google search for “September 11 conspiracy theory” throws up more than eight million results, while a search for “COVID conspiracy theory” shows more of the triple of this.
Technology companies say they have done everything possible to limit the dissemination of false information about 9/11. YouTube has added links to videos related to 9/11 from accredited sources. Facebook says it has added fact checks to several viral deceptions about 9/11, including one that the Pentagon was hit by a missile and not by a plane.
For many younger Americans who reached the age of majority after 9/11, the internet is the first place they turn to to find information about the event. 9/11 is not systematically taught in schools: some districts require it, while others barely mention it or ignore it altogether.
False claims about the attacks often arise at the 9/11 National Museum and Monument, which offers educational services to visitors and students across the country. These cases are an opportunity to talk about the facts of what happened, and the many investigations that followed, according to Megan Jones, senior director of educational programs at the monument.
“We now have a generation without memories of 9/11, so it’s important to share the stories of what happened,” Jones says.
False claims about the 9/11 attacks never posed the threat now attributed to misinformation about COVID-19 or the 2020 U.S. election. But even proponents of the theories of the 9/11 conspiracy says questions about what happened paved the way for the mistrust and anxiety behind today’s conspiracy theories.
“The danger is that once you have this mistrust in authority and government, you are in a dangerous place,” says Matt Campbell, a British citizen whose brother died at the World Trade Center on 9/11. Campbell believes the towers collapsed after a controlled demolition and is looking for a new investigation in the UK to review the death of his brother.
“If you think everything they’re telling you is a lie, then it just goes off,‘ it could be true, it might not be true, whatever it is, ’” Campbell says.
On a large scale, the mistrust underlying such beliefs can become dangerous when they begin to divide a society or when they are exploited by a political leader or an external adversary.
“It’s generally the case that people who feel they’re being excluded from power, are the ones who are committed to conspiracy theories,” Fenster says. “What’s different this time is that the party that was in power – the party that had the White House – was the main disseminator of conspiracy theories.”
From the beginning, conspiracy theories about 9/11 were popular among some liberals who disliked former President George W. Bush or opposed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But after Barack Obama became president, false claims about 9/11 began to gain popularity among some conservatives who cite them as an example of the work of the “Deep State.” of the State “).
Two years before she won her seat in Congress in 2020, Georgia Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene said she doubted a plane had hit the Pentagon. Last year she acknowledged that she had been wrong and tried to divert the blame by saying it was the government’s responsibility for her to spread misinformation.
“The problem is that our government lies a lot to us to protect the deep state; sometimes it’s hard to know what’s real and what’s not,” he tweeted.
Ben Crew is a screenwriter who has produced a video that discredits many popular conspiracy theories about 9/11. He also embarked on a project in which he travels the country and collects personal stories from 9/11, with the goal of getting at least one story from each of the 50 states.
Crew hears many conspiracy theories – claims that a missile struck the Pentagon, claims that the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the one that crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, were empty.
He says almost everyone he interviews considers 9/11 to be a key point in U.S. history, the beginning of a wave of anxiety and fear that for many people has not yet reached its peak.
“There seems to be an opportunity for everything to catch fire now,” Crew says. “9 11 ignited that.”