The scene arrives in focus: a car travels along a winding mountain road at night. Suddenly, the headlights flicker and then fade to black. The car is for death. The moonlight is all that’s left for our heroine, the owls sucking and the music vaguely ominous in the background.
You know things are about to go south because, as TVTropes.com points out, “only three things happen when you travel by road in a horror movie” and they all involve horrors. As our heroine gets out of the car, you may be tempted to shout, “Don’t go to the woods!” because nothing good ever comes from entering the forest at night. But yes, of course. There he finds an abandoned wooden hut. You can write the rest of the story yourself.
Over time, these troops become extremely predictable. Its predictability is used for many purposes. Just as film, song, and television narrators use the troops to make the stories more understandable and relevant, and ultimately to entertain us, misinformation providers use these same troops to make the their arguments are more understandable or related and ultimately to manipulate us. Knowing this, we may be able to keep more of us out of the woods.
You’ve probably seen a lot of troops in memes and online stories about Covid-19. The anti-vaccine movement has relied on the same plot devices for more than a century to make unfounded claims sound familiar and compelling.
In 2012, McMaster University economist Anna Kata wrote an article about tracking how the same troops are repeated, regardless of the vaccine, in the online vaccine dialogue. For example, note the widespread statement that “vaccines are not natural.” Then a sub-statement: “They will turn you into a chimera.” In the 1800s, those inoculated with smallpox vaccines derived from smallpox felt that they would become human cow hybrids. (They didn’t.) Today, social media influencers tell stories about mRNA vaccines “that alter our DNA !!!” (They are not.) Details have changed to suit the current pandemic, but the underlying troops are the same in 2021 as in 1801.
This “unnatural” trop is a key element within a larger, misleading narrative that says “vaccines are dangerous”. As academics at the American University and Harvard School of Public Health, along with a co-author here, have recently documented, narratives against the disinformation against the Covid-19 vaccine are similarly composed of recycled family troops. from past vaccines. Some are conspiratorial. In the early months of the pandemic, for example, “biological weapon” troops were in vogue. Anti-vaccine propagandists have often asserted these claims at the emergence of new diseases (Ebola, SARS, etc.) for the fear it generates. The trope of “disease as a biological weapon” has a purchase because it needs an unknown – the origin of the disease – and offers an orderly explanation with a seed of truth: Bioweapons programs exist … and we have also seen this film.
These basic elements (troops) also make conspiracy theory narratives transferable between topics. Prior to the pandemic, for example, the basic narratives of the vaccine movement about vaccines that caused all kinds of damage and government coverage of that damage had been incorporated into the QAnon movement, which had absorbed and reformulated the narratives of the old men of Zion, chemtrail conspiracies, and theories of the New World Order, among others. These troops are so easily transferable because there is a common architecture of conspiracy theories. One of the reasons why people who believe a conspiracy theory often believe that others may be that the same trope is shared by several theories: the belief in the man behind the curtain facilitates the purchase that l ‘man also covers a chemtrails program. That’s why when Jigsaw, a Google unit that explores threats to open societies, interviewed 70 conspiracy believers, each attributed to multiple conspiracy theories.
If you’ve seen a trope once, you’ll probably recognize it next time. This familiarity can help short-circuit the critical thinking we would normally use to evaluate new information. By grouping this problem together, troops are ideal for oversimplifying complex issues, such as the origins of a vaccine or the reasons for a protest. As media literacy expert Mike Caulfield points out, the troops flatten a scene down to its essential pieces, removing details to force us to come to a conclusion (the heroine will get out of her car!) Without all the facts in place. ‘scope.
But the fact that these manipulative troops are so frequent and recurring could also be their undoing. If we can predict which troops will be used to construct conspiracy narratives in the future, we may be able to prevent them. Instead of addressing and verifying facts about specific claims reactively, What if instead we discuss its fundamentals preventively?