Hello! Welcome to my new column here at the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry—the original North American skeptics organization since 1976.

Some of you may know me from my previous work over at Skeptic magazine under the leadership of my friend and mentor Pat Linse (cofounder of the Skeptics Society). For two decades, Pat entrusted me to research, write, and illustrate Junior Skeptic, a science and critical thinking publication she created for younger readers.

Sadly, Pat passed away in 2021. With this column, I hope to honor her legacy by focusing attention on an often discounted yet critically important truth about fringe claims.

‘Fringe’ Claims Are a Big Deal

It may seem surprising in the wake of QAnon, January 6, COVID-19 denial, and a worldwide surge in antivaccine conspiracy theories, but generations of skeptics have had to contend with an all-too-common complaint that paranormal, pseudoscientific, and conspiratorial claims are just not important. Researchers into popular misinformation and disinformation have frequently been accused of wasting time on supposedly trivial claims. Surely everyone already knows that the earth isn’t flat, Bigfoot isn’t real, and vaccines protect against sickness—right? Why waste time on marginal beliefs when there are real problems to study?

If anything good has come from the past few harrowing years of pandemic and political upheaval, it is a growing recognition that bogus claims and false beliefs can matter quite a bit. Misinformation reaches far beyond the margins of society. Indeed, preposterous falsehoods and made-up nonsense can and do shape world events on the very largest scales.

As former President Barack Obama recently observed, the spread of disinformation on social media and a “media environment that elevates falsehoods as much as truths” has “created real challenges for our democracy.” Obama is merely the latest to join a chorus of journalists, scholars, science communicators, public health officials, and political leaders who have raised the alarm about our current “plague of misinformation”—a global “infodemic.”¹

As I write this, political propaganda is driving a brutal war across Europe’s largest country. “Stolen election” and “coming storm” conspiracy claims have incited violence and threatened to overturn a U.S. Presidential election. Politicians and media figures are inciting a new wave of hatred against vulnerable LGBTQ teachers with cynical false claims about “grooming” children in public schools. The climate crisis burns out of control, with necessary action having been delayed for decades by denialist pseudoscience. More than one million Americans have died of a pandemic disease that deniers have variously claimed to be a deliberate “plandemic” or a nonexistent “media hoax.” Hundreds of thousands of those deaths may have been prevented if not for widespread conspiracy claims that vaccines don’t work, contain microchips, cause COVID-19, kill patients, or somehow turn people into magnets.

A Rising Tide?

With stakes so high, I’m grateful that the critical study of patent nonsense—once a backwater for quirky obsessives such as yours truly—is finally attracting greater attention from respectable mainstream journalism and scholarship. “Misinformation has reached crisis proportions,” warned one notable 2021 paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “It poses a risk to international peace, interferes with democratic decision making, endangers the well-being of the planet, and threatens public health.”

This is a “crisis” by any reasonable measure. Is it a crisis unique to our time? Generations of skeptics have viewed their own decades in a similar light. “It is well known that I am the culprit responsible for the founding of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal,” recalled philosopher Paul Kurtz. “Why did I do so? Because I was dismayed in 1976 by the rising tide of belief in the paranormal and the lack of adequate scientific examinations of these claims. At that time a wide range of claims were everywhere present” (Kurtz 2001).

Questionable claims were indeed everywhere in the 1970s. A quick glance at the earliest issues of the pioneering Skeptical Inquirer magazine (originally The Zetetic) reveals a surprisingly current slate of examples, including psychics, UFOs, conspiracy theories, and ancient aliens. Was this a rising tide or just the way things tend to be?

Astronomer Carl Sagan (another founder of modern movement skepticism) had little patience for “rising tide” rhetoric. When one looks back at popular misinformation at “almost any time in human history, you find just as many examples as from our present time,” Sagan explained. “This is an endemic human characteristic—to be credulous, to believe what others tell us, to prefer what feels good to what’s true” (Head 2006, 114).

The “infodemic” may seem new, but in some ways it’s as old as civilization. Large majorities of people have always believed untrue conspiracy stories, “vulgar errors,” “extraordinary popular delusions,” and bogus paranormal claims. False claims and muddy thinking have been human universals throughout history.

What’s changed? The level of threat that credulity poses.

“It’s not that there’s something new in our way of thinking,” Sagan explained, “it’s that credulous and confused thinking can be much more lethal in ways it was never before.” In a technological, interconnected modern world, “The dangers of not thinking clearly are much greater now than ever before” (Head 2006, 114).

Digital communication has accelerated disinformation far beyond anything Gulliver’s Travels author Jonathan Swift could have imagined when he observed, “Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it.” Social media algorithms and partisan “infotainment” amplify congenial false beliefs, deepening the chasm between reality and “alternative facts.” And, at the very same time, hanging terrifyingly over everything, is climate change and rising authoritarianism. The pandemic exponentially multiplied the damage misinformation can do.

What Can Be Done?

“How can we mitigate the spread of disinformation and misinformation? This is one of the current burning questions in social, political and media circles across the world,” holds a recent paper in the journal Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. “The answer is complicated,” explains the author, but I think we can start with that one simple lesson from the history of skepticism so far:

If we wish to confront misinformation, we must first accept that misinformation matters.

Moreover, it always has mattered. I’ve spent my career arguing that the “third domain” of weird beliefs dually rejected by mainstream science and religion is a chronically understudied major pillar of human experience—and, ultimately, human actions. The “fringe” is not fringe but central to the lives of billions. The destiny of nations hinges on false beliefs just as much as on truths. Misinformation may be the central challenge for our future as a species.

This understanding has historically proven hard to sustain. Society perpetually defaults to dismissing fringe claims as unworthy of attention. Mainstream intellectuals rarely take unseemly nonsense seriously—until it surges to a scale that cannot be avoided.

This is a folly of the wise. If we ignore fringe claims until they threaten catastrophe, the damage is already done. Swift could have been talking about QAnon, “stolen election” claims, or COVID-19 conspiracy theories when he warned, “if a lie be believed only for an hour, it hath done its work … so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect.”

It’s dangerous to treat misinformation as an afterthought. Consider the dismay of outgoing National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins, who “never imagined” tens of millions of Americans would refuse safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines “because of misinformation and disinformation that somehow dominated all of the ways in which people were getting their answers.”

The problem was Collins and his colleagues are experts on medical science—which is largely irrelevant in the antivaccine space. Collins ruefully put his finger on a key issue: “maybe we underinvested in research on human behavior.” What was needed was specialist knowledge of the history, organization, tactics, and pseudoscientific rhetoric of the antivaccine movement. Experienced watchdogs wearily anticipated a well-honed and effective misinformation campaign against COVID-19 vaccines. After all, antivaccine fearmongering is an industry. The pandemic was always going to be a gold rush for antivaccine activists, grifters, and moral entrepreneurs. It was inevitable.

Misinformation Preparedness

And yet, cynical, weaponized disinformation is only part of the problem. The truth is that a vast global cauldron of misinformation boils and churns at all times, even when we forget it is there. Every one of us is a reservoir of contagious ideas and a potential host for more. Fringe claims constantly multiply and compete in an unseen ecosystem, awaiting conditions to break free.

It isn’t enough to merely react to exponential explosions of viral nonsense. To even begin to manage our endemic misinformation problem, we need sustained, ongoing, proactive critical attention from dedicated experts before seemingly marginal claims mutate or metastasize to threaten society.

For several decades, the largely volunteer skeptical movement has attempted to fill that need. The “emerging field of disinformation studies” is another attempt—a research trend that is both wider and more narrow in scope than traditional “scientific skepticism.”

The new crop of academics, media critics, and independent researchers tend to focus on conspiracy theories and political extremism (such as tracking the back-channel chatter of Ottawa “convoy” occupiers in early 2022), COVID-19 misinformation, and the mechanisms through which misinformation is distributed (such as social media, online influencers, and bot networks). These are natural areas to prioritize because they are urgent, dangerous, quantifiable, or some combination of all three.

But this isn’t the whole story. Extremist beliefs do not exist in a vacuum. The deadliest fringe claims share mechanisms and conceptual structure with the goofiest ones—and harmless claims do not always stay that way. Fringe claims hybridize, cross-pollinate, and mutually reinforce each other. Moreover, acceptance of one predicts acceptance of others (as demonstrated, for example, by flat-earthers and wellness influencers drawn into QAnon).

So, where do we go from here? Can we sustain this moment of heightened awareness, build on it, and construct more comprehensive and effective new approaches to the study of false claims?

Carl Sagan famously warned (here in Skeptical Inquirer in 1995) that global society’s “combustible mixture of ignorance and power” was “going to blow up in our faces” (Sagan 1995). He feared that “pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive” as our “ethnic or national prejudices are aroused … when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us.” And he urged us to be ready when humanity’s “demons begin to stir” (Sagan 1996, 26–27).

Let’s face it: despite this warning, none of us were truly prepared when Sagan’s dreaded moment came. Can we somehow catch up and meet the challenge of our time? And will we be better prepared for the next inevitable “demon-haunted” infodemic? I’d like to find out.

Notes

1. This term was apparently coined in 2003 but gained new currency in the context of COVID-19 when it was used by high profile figures such as Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO). (See “Words We’re Watching: Infodemic,” Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/words-were-watching-infodemic-meaning.)

References

Head, Tom (ed.). 2006. Conversations with Carl Sagan. Jackson, MI: University Press of Mississippi.

Kurtz, Paul. 2001. A quarter century of skeptical inquiry: My personal involvement. Skeptical Inquirer 25(4) (July/August): 42.

Sagan, Carl. 1995. Wonder and skepticism. Skeptical Inquirer 19(1) (January/February): 26.

———. 1996. The Demon-Haunted World. New York, NY: Random House, 1996.), 26–27.