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Joe Uscinski crunches the numbers!
26 Plays4 years ago
M interviews Joe Uscinski (University of Miami) about polls and polling data about belief in conspiracy theories. The numbers might not lie, but the way people do treat the polls might be a little suspect...
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Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
You can learn more about M’s academic work at: http://mrxdentith.com
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Transcript
Public Awareness and Voting Impact
00:00:00
Speaker
So, the numbers are in and they are exciting. 84% of the people we polled knew about it. And 56% of those who knew believed strongly that it was true. What was true? Good question. But more importantly, 76% of them claimed it would affect their vote.
00:00:19
Speaker
Now this compares pretty unfavourably with our last poll in which only 64% of people knew of it. How many people did you poll? Another great question. Now that polling period did occur during trying circumstances. Do not mention the incident. So it seems belief is up. Way up. Belief in what though? An excellent question. You ask great questions Joe. We really appreciate having your expertise on this.
00:00:49
Speaker
But you're not actually paying attention to the issues I'm raising here. Very true. Now, turning to the second question, 26% of people claim not to believe the results of the first question. Fucking unbelievable.
Introduction to the Podcast and Hosts
00:01:09
Speaker
The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. Indentive.
00:01:19
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy. I am Josh Addison in Auckland, New Zealand, and all the way back down south in Kiririrawa, Hamilton, New Zealand, it's Dr. M. Denteth. For one week, one glorious week, we actually managed to co-locate, but
00:01:37
Speaker
wasn't to last. No, it was not to be. Some of us have to be kept separated, whether it be by law, by ethics, or by act of God. So basically back to business as usual, really. Now we have another interview episode for you. But before we get into that, I understand we have
Patron Introduction Plans
00:01:57
Speaker
a new patron. We do indeed. Now, as is customary, we'll be introducing this new patron in our opening sketch next week.
00:02:06
Speaker
just for the sheer fact that by the time we had the new patron, we also had a prepared sketch for this week relating to the guest of this week, which meant we had to shift things by one week. And that's just the way that the media works. Just life. It's true. But more importantly, Josh, because we'll focus on the importance of a new patron next week, I believe you should have some thoughts about something I've written.
00:02:30
Speaker
I'm not saying I have no thoughts, but yes, no. So that paper you've been working on with a cast of thousands, I gather, is out and live and dangerous to know. Yeah, I did read it, honest to goodness. I skipped through a lot of the statistics-y stuff and kind of concentrated on the stuff that it seemed most obvious you had written.
00:03:00
Speaker
Yeah, to be honest, I have no firm opinions other than it was an interesting read. Now, for those of you who are going, what is Josh talking about, given his complete failure to contextualize what's been talked
COVID-19 Disinformation Research in NZ
00:03:13
Speaker
about? Context. We don't need context. I am a co-author on a new paper which has been put out by Tipunaha Matatine, which is a
00:03:21
Speaker
think tank slash research group operating out of the University of Auckland as led by Kate Hannah. And we've produced a paper called COVID-19 disinformation in Aotearoa New Zealand social media, also known as COVID-19 new research prevalence and nature of COVID-19 disinformation in Aotearoa New Zealand social media.
00:03:43
Speaker
So if you go to the Te Puna Ha Matatini website, you'll get a link to the PDF. There's also a layperson's version of it up on the spin-off, which now I think about it. Maybe that's what I should have directed you to read, Josh. Maybe you should have, but I'll hunt that one down as well. For the GFA, there's a lot less data to crunch. There's a lot more prose to read. Right, very good.
00:04:07
Speaker
So has it, aside from being summarised in the spin-off, has it received much attention? Well, yes. I mean, I've received an awful lot of media inquiries based upon that paper. So I've been quoted in Staff, Newsroom, Manawatu, Herald.
00:04:30
Speaker
RNZ, there's a whole bunch of media outlets in this country who having read the paper wanted comment on some of the claims because the big claim we make in that paper is that despite appearances there is really no big surge or indeed any real change in COVID-19 disinformation or conspiracy theories going on at
Media vs Reality on Disinformation
00:04:51
Speaker
the moment.
00:04:51
Speaker
things are remarkably stable and also not particularly prevalent and people are going that doesn't seem to square with our experience of stuff on social media particularly our experience of Facebook. Now the paper does not cover Facebook for a whole bunch of logistical reasons one of which is Facebook does not let you scrape data and if they catch you doing it they ban your account so
00:05:18
Speaker
we cannot look at the Facebook data in the same way we can look at the Twitter data. But it does seem that things are not as bad as maybe people in the media are presenting it as being. And that's what I'm being questioned on. How do we square the research results with how people are seeing things in the world? And that quite nicely ties into
00:05:42
Speaker
the discussion that I had with Joe Ucinski earlier this week. Yes, because in that discussion the shoe is kind of on the other foot there. You're the one grilling Joe about the fact that his findings don't conform to what we think we're seeing, or at least they don't feel right.
00:06:01
Speaker
Yes. And I think the they don't feel right is a really, really interesting term. And we'll probably come back to that when we have what we should call Josh's commentary after the interview that I conducted. So I don't think we have anything else to say. Shall we just go straight ahead and play the interview? We shall indeed. Let's roll that tape.
00:06:30
Speaker
I'm talking with Joe Usinski, an associate professor in political studies at the University of Miami, and I will note for the purposes of how this discussion is going to go a friend.
Polling and Conspiracy Beliefs
00:06:39
Speaker
I'm talking with Joe today about polls and what they tell us about belief in certain conspiracy theories in the here and now, and I'm going to pretend to not know much about polling in order to get something on the record about the disjunct between what certain academics and people in the media are saying and what Joe is seeing in his research work.
00:06:58
Speaker
A lot of this came out of my talking with David Farrier two weeks ago, after he had talked with Joe, and helped very tempting to go, I recognise what Joe was seeing, but surely the real story is, based upon purely anecdotal data. So hello Joe, I hope things in sunshine state, apparently that's very hard for me to say, I hope things in the sunshine state are well at least sunny at the moment.
00:07:27
Speaker
Well, they are indeed sunny and it's very beautiful here. The COVID infection rate has come down from where it was spiking in the summer, schools back in session and things are fairly normal. They actually have me teaching in person, but I'm teaching in the basketball stadium. So because my class is so big,
00:07:52
Speaker
I'm teaching at center court between the two basketball nets. And then the kids each have their own row up in the in the sections and the rafters. And they have my face up on the jumbotron. I like the fact that you said things are normal here. I'm teaching in the basketball court. I mean, in many respects, actually, she kind of what I expect to Florida anyway. Yeah, I mean, it's it's
00:08:22
Speaker
There is a lot of bad behavior here that I notice. I mean, Miami is not a city that's like, hey, that's an intellectual place. It's a city based on tourism and fun and margaritas and beach and this and that. So we were walking around this weekend, my wife and I, and you see just big groups of people, no masks on, getting on and off of boats, doing all sorts of behaviors they shouldn't be engaging in. It's the tourism cities, so that only makes it worse.
00:08:52
Speaker
But the university has done a really good job with it as far as that can possibly go. And I'm fairly comfortable on campus, but things haven't changed much for me since March. I work out of my bedroom. And when I do teach, I teach two classes in person during the week. I drive right to the class, do it and leave.
00:09:18
Speaker
both nights and that's about it. So until there's a vaccine, I'm sort of, you know, I guess it's sort of dug in.
00:09:29
Speaker
Yes, I think for a lot of people, you are describing how their work life now proceeds. You huddle at home until such time, you have to rush into your workplace, get your work done as quickly as possible, and then you run back home into the predictive cover of the, I'm assuming the Florida mansion in which you live.
00:09:52
Speaker
Yeah, the Florida mansion. I would say that I'm a mole person, but that has its own connotation in the QAnon world. So I don't want to say that, but it's sort of, I sort of feel like that in the sense that I, you know, I'm in one place, I pop my head out every once in a while and that's about it. See, you should be describing yourself as a chud, a cannibaloid humanoid underground dweller that would really get on the QAnon radar.
00:10:22
Speaker
Yeah, so the only thing that wouldn't work with that is I'm 23 floors in the air, so.
00:10:27
Speaker
Ah, we'll find some way around that. We'll find a thing. Now, talking- There's gonna be a Chad. Oh, yeah, the aerial, cannibaloid, humanoid, dweller, Chad and Chud. Chud to the underground one. Yeah, but then that's not good in Florida either, because we have our own history with hanging Chuds. Yes, you really do. And that's a whole different conspiracy theory. Let's focus on the QAnon one.
00:10:56
Speaker
because the media recently have been making out a lot about QAnon and COVID-19 conspiracy theories being rife and being persuasive. And it seems that you're saying something quite different from what you're seeing in your research work. So what's going on, Jar? So what I want to do is talk about my and others polling data and how that is
00:11:23
Speaker
contrasting with what the headlines are. So let me just give you a handful of examples of what recent headlines in the mainstream news are and that way it will really sort of hammer home the point that
00:11:38
Speaker
that what I'm finding is not what the headlines are saying. So Los Angeles Magazine, August 17th headline. Inside QAnon, the conspiracy cult that's devouring America. Washington Post, August 16th. QAnon is a menace. Ignoring isn't an option. CNN, August 15th. QAnon is conspiratorial, dangerous, and growing. And we're talking about it all wrong. NPR, 814. Why you should care about QAnon.
00:12:08
Speaker
Wall Street Journal 813, QAnon booms on Facebook as conspiracy group gains mainstream traction. The New York Times 813, think QAnon is on the fringe? So was the Tea Party. NBC 810, QAnon groups have millions of members on Facebook documents show. New York Times 813, the rise of QAnon
00:12:35
Speaker
NBC News 814, how QAnon rode the pandemic to new heights. Insider, QAnon is leaking into the mainstream, moving from internet fringes to primetime cable news as Americans keep falling for the unfounded conspiracy theory. Bloomberg 888, QAnon is running amok. So I think you get the idea at this point and I can keep going on, I've got a long list of these.
00:13:03
Speaker
where the claim is very clearly that this is big, getting bigger, it's going mainstream, it's running amok. And a second claim that I'll get to, I think is equally important that is that it's far right in some meaningful way and that it's taking over the Republican party. But these are the claims that are repeatedly made in mainstream news.
00:13:30
Speaker
So the question is, what data backs up any of these claims or are journalists just making stuff up? Now, Joe, you're asking my questions here. I want to say, what is the evidence that backs up these claims and are journalists making stuff up? So the evidence that's usually brought to bear by the journalists is, well, we can see this online.
00:13:55
Speaker
There are people discussing this on Twitter, and there are a number of Facebook groups, and there are people interacting with these groups, and there's hashtags that trend every so often. But none of those things are good indicators of public opinion writ large. Not all internet use is authentic. Some people are trolls. I mean, some of this stuff is mechanized. I don't know how much, and it's hard to tell,
00:14:25
Speaker
But again, at least some portion of this is inauthentic or it's the same user doing multiple things. Another thing that's brought to bear often in these discussions as well, there was a rally for Trump and some people wore Q-shirts. Or there was a rally for save the children and some people had Q and on signs. None of those are good indicators of public opinion writ large.
00:14:54
Speaker
So, I mean, they're interesting anecdotes and they tell us something, but they don't tell us change over time and they don't tell us about how many of these believers there are out in the world. And I think we have to be very careful at making big generalizations from these anecdotes. Like we would never say, oh, I think Joe Biden's gonna win the election because there's a bunch of Joe Biden Facebook groups.
00:15:22
Speaker
I mean, anyone making that claim would be laughed out of town. So I don't know why we're seeing that as okay in this instance. I mean, those are interesting issues because I'm currently involved in a project here in Aotearoa, New Zealand, looking at the prevalence of COVID-19 disinformation in social media. And certainly all the results that we're getting indicate that actually
00:15:49
Speaker
Not only is there not much discussion of COVID-19 disinformation or conspiracy theories going on, it's also not growing. It's remarkably stable and at a really low level. And yet our journalistic class here is doing exactly the same thing. They go, oh, we've got masses of COVID-19 conspiracy theories. It's a deep pervasive threat to the polis. And the actual social media data is going,
00:16:17
Speaker
It doesn't appear to be a big issue at all. Most people have no idea why journalists are talking about it, but they are thinking that because they're reading it in news stories, it must be a big issue. They're just not seeing it themselves. Here's the thing is that if you start focusing on this one thing, then you're going to find it everywhere, right? Because you're looking for it.
00:16:47
Speaker
And that would be the same thing. You could pick any conspiracy theory that's been around for a few years and start finding it. And you will find some politicians who've engaged with it. And you'll find a bunch of people who have signs for it at some rally somewhere. And you'll find somebody with a t-shirt. I used to go to anti-GMO rallies just because there was a lot of conspiracy rhetoric there. And
00:17:12
Speaker
Um, what I found, there was always 9 11 people walking around people, you know, with CIA conspiracy theories and all sorts of other stuff. And if I was focusing on that, I'd be like, aha, looks like this conspiracy theory has taken over.
00:17:30
Speaker
the GMO movement, when in fact that's not what's really happening. I think this is a kind of associated thing which I was talking with a journalist about yesterday, which is motability. If you're concerned, if you're say a crime reporter, you tend to write on violent
Media Influence on Perception of Incidents
00:17:49
Speaker
crime.
00:17:49
Speaker
If violent crime is going down, then suddenly every instance of violent crime looks much more noteworthy because of how rare it typically is. So you want to write about it because it's a really notable story, which then has the on-flow effect of people going, oh, there's been a flurry of violent crime stories in the paper recently. Crime must be going up, but it's only appearing more often in the paper because of how rare crime has actually become.
00:18:19
Speaker
I mean, that's a really good example because there are studies of exactly that going back decades where they say the actual rates of crime do not match up with crime reporting. I mean, those are two very different things. So if your only view of the outside world was what you were reading in the papers, you'd be living in a different world, right?
00:18:43
Speaker
And that's the same thing here. I think there's other issues here too. I think that there are some incentives. And again, I don't want to impugn anybody's intentions or motives. They need to speak for themselves, but I think some of this QAnon coverage is very clickable so that you get these, you know, headlines that say, oh, it's mainstream and taking over, you know, because people are going to click on that.
00:19:08
Speaker
That's more quote unquote newsworthy than saying, oh, it's stable and small, which people might not click on. So there are financial incentives here for the news outlets to hype it up in the headlines at least. I think there are reporters who are on the fake news and conspiracy beat whose career incentives are now attached to this potentially being bigger than it really is.
00:19:36
Speaker
But here's the thing is that if you're reporting on this, you don't have to say it's bigger than it is. It can be just as important at the size that it is now. You don't have to inflate it.
00:19:46
Speaker
Yeah, and this is actually a point which I've been making about COVID-19 conspiracy theories. Even if it turns out there aren't that many COVID-19 conspiracy theorists operating in New Zealand, it only requires a few people to believe them for them to act differently. So not wear masks, not engage in social distancing, not wash their hands, at which point they become a victor for the disease. So it's still worth reporting on. You just don't want to overhype the level of support.
00:20:17
Speaker
It's still important, regardless of how many it is. And obviously if it's bigger, it becomes worse. But even if it's 10% of people who say, well, I don't think COVID is real and I'm not going to wear a mask, that's a serious, serious problem. You don't have to lie and say, it's taken over the world.
00:20:34
Speaker
We can be honest with the numbers and still have a serious problem on our hands that's worth reporting, worth reading about, and worth addressing. That's the same thing with QAnon. Even if it's a handful of people, I think it's still worth exploring why people have these views and these ideologies and given people who have acted based on some of these ideas.
00:21:00
Speaker
with deleterious consequences, it's still worth looking at. But we need to be very honest here about how many people it is and exactly what's driving that behavior and why. Yes, I think that's a very important question. So what do your poll results say? So let me start out with this. I mean, QAnon has become prominent in reporting partially for two reasons.
00:21:29
Speaker
One is because you've had some people act on these ideas. You had somebody take over the Hoover Dam, you had somebody shoot a crime mob boss, and kill him. You had a woman run her car into a bunch of pedestrians thinking she was saving children. There was another woman who went sort of viral on social media because she trashed a mask aisle at a Target department store.
00:21:59
Speaker
There are instances that are bizarre and you're like, oh my God, people are acting on this and it makes it think like everyone's acting on it and it's happening all the time. But here's the thing, when you read these stories a little bit further down and you get to the 9th or 15th paragraph, you find that some of these people are mentally ill. The guy who shot the mafia boss has been deemed incompetent to stand trial.
00:22:27
Speaker
the woman who ran her car into pedestrians when you read the ninth paragraph of the story. So she has a long history of untreated mental illness and was drunk when she did this. The person who freaked out at Target turned out she had manic bipolar depression disorder. And this was exacerbated by the pandemic in which I think she lost her job and was isolated for a long period of time.
00:22:58
Speaker
What's getting conflated in some of these stories is that these are vulnerable people who have untreated illnesses, and in some ways, it looks like they've been left behind. So is the real story QAnon, or is the real story something else? And I would submit that it's at least something else, and that something else may have made them vulnerable to this QAnon stuff.
00:23:27
Speaker
the majority of people who are engaging with QAnon aren't going out and doing these sorts of things. So I think this is more of an issue of how we're ignoring mental illness in many places around the world, and we shouldn't be, right? Because these are the sorts of things that will happen when you choose to do that. So that's one part. So
00:23:52
Speaker
What I've been doing for the last two and a half years is polling either the state of Florida for reasons I'll get into in a minute or the US as a whole. So in 2018, a bunch of Q supporters wore Q t-shirts to a Trump rally and that sparked a whole lot of mainstream news coverage in the summer of 2018. So I just happened to have a poll about to go out in Florida
00:24:21
Speaker
So I threw QAnon on there and I did it as a feeling thermometer where I said, how much do you support the QAnon movement on a scale from zero to 100 with 100 being you really don't like it and, or excuse me, zero being you don't like 100 being you really, really like it. And we also do some other things on there. And just as a testing mechanism, we also put Fidel Castro.
00:24:45
Speaker
And if you know anything about Florida, you know, we don't like Castro here. Everyone danced in the street when he, when he died. QAnon on average in the summer of 2018 was about a 24. Castro was about a 22. So not well liked.
00:25:02
Speaker
And further, it wasn't any more liked by Republicans than by Democrats. I think there was only a few point difference on average. And once you account for people's worldviews, like if they saw the world through a conspiratorial lens, partisanship was not a predictor of how they weighted QAnon.
00:25:22
Speaker
So not far right, not well liked. A lot of people didn't rate it because they didn't know what it was, so not well known. So all the things that were being said about it then were, as far as I could tell, wrong. I continued those polls both online, you know, excuse me, both across the country and in Florida, you know, with a few follow ups and have found the same thing repeatedly.
00:25:49
Speaker
And I've done some more extensive polling where we asked the question in the same way. And we said, well, how much do you like QAnon? But then we'll also go through and ask about other psychological characteristics. So not only their conspiratorial worldviews, but their what's called the dark triad, which is sort of antisocial, psychological characteristics, sociopathy, Machiavellianism, and narcissism.
00:26:16
Speaker
And what we find is that the most significant predictors of this, of QAnon support are the dark triad and conspiracy thinking. And also we asked the question, do you sometimes share false information online? And that also predicts belief in QAnon. So you get a personality profile of these people who like QAnon who are
00:26:41
Speaker
narcissistic Machiavellian sociopaths who see the world through a conspiratorial lens and like to share fake stuff online. Now, I don't want to paint everyone with such a broad brush. And again, we're talking about relative levels rather than absolute levels of these things. So it's not like everyone is a deranged lunatic sociopath, but they were finding that the people who really like it have heightened levels of these things.
00:27:10
Speaker
So what we're finding now is that QAnon is sort of a different kind of extremism. It's not a left-right extremism. It's not a partisan extremism. It's not far right in any meaningful sense. It's based on other personality traits. So you gotta think for a little bit, who's that person who's gonna fall into that belief that satanic baby eaters control the government and be able to hold on to it?
00:27:37
Speaker
in spite of evidence to the contrary and it not really being supported anywhere mainstream. That's gonna be somebody who's probably a little bit narcissistic. They're right and they know it. Somebody who's a little bit sociopathic. They can buy into these ideas despite everyone else not buying into it and pushing back against it. So that's what I would submit at this point. That's my thinking now.
00:28:06
Speaker
But I think there's some broader lessons there to think about, both in terms of conspiracy theory beliefs and in terms of political extremism. So just to start with the latter, I don't think that a lot of what we call political extremism is really an outcropping of extreme partisanship or constrained conservative liberal ideology. I think it's something else.
00:28:36
Speaker
And in terms of conspiracy beliefs, I think that there are some that probably might get started by politics. But think about what does it take to hold onto the idea that, you know, whether it's satanic, baby eaters control the government, there's got to be other factors, personality factors that allow someone to have that for a long period of time.
00:29:03
Speaker
Right. It's not just going to be political views. It's going to be personality views that allow people to have those ideas.
00:29:11
Speaker
So this is all information which is basically coming out of the polling data and associated analysis of those polls. So we should probably actually talk about how these polls are done, because a lot of people, and as I said at the top of the show, I sometimes have this kind of gut reaction. We'll go, but hold on, why should we trust your fancy mathematical polling data over what I experience in my day-to-day life on social media?
00:29:41
Speaker
So tell the audience something about how these polls are done and why we should be trusting the polling dowser rather than our own anecdotal experiences. So polling is like anything else. It could be done well or it could be done poorly, right? So it's not that you should trust all polls, but if there are polls that have reasonable samples, you know, a thousand or more people,
00:30:11
Speaker
that represent the population that you're trying to speak to and have questions that are written in a way that would tap what you're trying to talk about, then it seems reasonable
00:30:28
Speaker
I have to trust it 100% blindly, but when you have different polls doing different things coming out with similar answers, then I become fairly strong in my view of the evidence. If it's just a one-shot poll, could be wrong. If it's poorly worded, not going to pay attention to it. If it's a bad sample,
00:30:50
Speaker
But let me line up the evidence that makes me fairly certain of my conclusions thus far. Now, that being said, people can change their minds in the future and Q might become, you know,
00:31:06
Speaker
you know, tomorrow's ice cream sundae that everybody wants. Because polls are just a snapshot of it of time. Yeah. Yeah.
Polling Methodology and Challenges
00:31:14
Speaker
So what I've been doing is I've pulled both Florida and the US with samples of more than 2000 people which have been taken online. And, and the samples that we get are people who one when they take our polls have to pass attention checks. So they're not just plugging in nonsense. And to this the samples match census data for what
00:31:35
Speaker
both the state of Florida or in my national polls what the US looks like. So we're getting a pretty reasonable sample of people. And in my polls, as I mentioned, we just say rate the QAnon movement.
00:31:49
Speaker
your support from it from zero to 100. So we're not getting into, is it the deep state version? Is it the satanic baby eating version? Is it some other version? We're not conflating it with different ideas. It's just straight up QAnon support. And it's very low in that method. And that's been consistent over two years. There was a Pew poll that came out in March of this year that asked people, how much do you know about QAnon?
00:32:19
Speaker
75% responded that they knew nothing. About 20 some odd percent said that they knew a little and 3% said they knew a lot. So for something that we're saying has gone mainstream and taking over, I mean by March of this year, where it had already gotten a lot of coverage up to that point for two years, nobody knew about it.
00:32:48
Speaker
you know, three quarters of Americans knew nothing about it. There was an Emerson poll last August. Again, even last August, QAnon had received a lot of, August of 2019. Even then, QAnon had received a lot of coverage. And that asked people a straight up yes or no question. Do you believe QAnon? And I think only 5% said yes. So,
00:33:17
Speaker
This is one of those things where you've got my data telling a story that's asked in one way over multiple samples over two years. You've got the Pew data getting to knowledge of it. And you've got the Emerson data just asking a straight up question, do you believe it? And they're all pointing in the same direction. And that direction is opposite of where the headlines are pointing, right?
00:33:44
Speaker
So something's, you know, sound like a conspiracy theory, something's going on, right? And I'm more willing to go with the polling data than I am with just the headlines.
00:33:59
Speaker
Now this is the point where I'm going to ask you the Gotcha question, although I've already prepared you as to what this Gotcha question is going to be, because there was a poll which came out earlier this month run by Daily Kos, the Civics poll, which states, awareness of QAnon has grown substantially since one year ago. In July 2019, 35% of Americans had never heard of QAnon.
00:34:23
Speaker
that number has fallen to 14% now. So they're suggesting a massive number, 86% of the population knows about QAnon. That seems to go against what you've just said. Yeah, so if you look through that question,
00:34:40
Speaker
I have it in front of me now. It's sort of a triple-barreled question where they say, well, do you believe the QAnon theory? I don't remember the exact wording. I'll give you the, I've got the question here. Do you believe that the QAnon theory about a conspiracy among deep state elites is true? And the answers were, yes, mostly true, 16%.
00:35:05
Speaker
Yes, some parts are true, 16%. No, not true at all, 43%. I've never heard of QAnon, 14%, unsure, 11%. Yeah, so first thing you can take away there is, as you point out, is there's a massive jump in people knowing about it, right? Between what Pew found in March and what this is suggesting now. But let's just start with the question wording. As you're sort of conflating QAnon
00:35:35
Speaker
conspiracy with deep state and elites. And each of those can be their own trigger, right? And so people may be saying, yes, simply for one part of that and not for the other parts of it. Then when you get to the answer set, it's like, oh, I believe a lot of it, some of it, and then don't know about it. So now you're conflating what they know with how much they agree. So they may be agreeing with something they never heard of before.
00:36:04
Speaker
And so a better way to do this question would be, you know, if you want to talk, if you're concerned about QAnon and that people are supporting it because it has satanic sex pedophiles and baby eaters who control the government, you should be asking that directly. But if you're just talking about deep state elites, that's a much more banal question. I mean, when I poll on, do you believe there's a deep state that's unaccountable
00:36:32
Speaker
embedded within the government, we get 55% of Americans saying, yeah, they agree with that. That's a fairly widely held belief. But obviously the QAnon version of baby eating Satanists is much more specific and probably a little bit more concerning. So if you're gonna talk about QAnon, that's more the version you wanna get into rather than just these more benign widespread ideas.
00:36:59
Speaker
So that's my concern, or those are some of my concerns with that question, but how this has been interpreted by the media is one of those things where, again, it's making me pull my hair out, because when I was talking to journalists before this poll came out, they said, well, polling isn't good for getting to something like this. Polling, people aren't going to tell you the truth,
00:37:26
Speaker
It's not the right mechanism for measuring this. You can have your polls, and Pew can have its polls, and Emerson can have its polls. It's all fine and good, but polls aren't the right way. Soon as a poll comes out that tells people what they want to hear, then all of a sudden, oh, it's the best poll ever. So other objections to my polling had nothing to do with the methodology. And again, I was pointing out my own polls,
00:37:55
Speaker
and multiple ones in other polls from other houses. And they want to discard all of it because they don't like polling, but then as soon as they hear something what they want, wow, this is great. This polling is perfect. That's telling me what I want to know. And that's garbage. That's just motivated reasoning at play here.
00:38:14
Speaker
Yes, there is something quite interesting, as you say, about people going, well, when the poll suits me, I'm going to go, yes, polling is great, but when the poll is not good, I'm going to ignore it, which, of course, we see with political parties all the time. Political parties love polls, except from when they absolutely hate polls. And you can kind of tell when they love a poll is when the poll sees exactly what the party wants the poll to say. And I think we all kind of take polling data in exactly the same way.
00:38:44
Speaker
Yeah, especially in this case, and it's really bad. But I mean, in the field that you and I work in, I mean, there's been a lack of measurement for many decades,
Conspiracy Theory Prevalence Claims
00:38:54
Speaker
and measurement only started in, you know, maybe 10 or 12 years ago, and it's only become a little more rigorous since then. But there have been claims made by journalists going back decades that say this is the time of conspiracy theory.
00:39:10
Speaker
Everyone's more conspiratorial now. This is the time. This is the Golden Age. This is the apex. And first of all, it can't always be true. But second of all, it's sad in newspapers every year. It's sad in newspapers probably every week now. But it's not based on anything. What are they basing this on? I mean, you're making an empirical claim that speaks to phenomenon occurring over time.
00:39:40
Speaker
but all they're doing is licking their thumb, putting it to the wind and saying, well, it feels like now. Well, that's no way to buttress a claim like that. That's not right. So I guess this is something that's emblematic of conspiracy theories and coverage of it for decades where there's not good data out there and journalists have just grown used to saying whatever they feel like.
00:40:10
Speaker
And I think at this point, I've been fairly forthcoming with my data. I've published it in the Washington Post. I've now done stuff in the Guardian, in Canadian newspapers, in the Daily Post and Mail. Just past week, I was in the New York Daily News making the same points. And so there's no reason for anyone to ignore any of this at this point.
00:40:39
Speaker
It doesn't mean they have to agree with me, but it just means that if they're going to make a claim that runs counter to the available evidence, they got to have good reason for doing it and shouldn't just be making stuff up.
00:40:51
Speaker
So as you were saying that, I was thinking about a question I was asked by a journalist yesterday, and she asked, do you think there's more talk about conspiracy going on in our local body politics here? And my response was, I'm actually probably the worst person to ask about that, because my day job is looking for examples of conspiracies to use in my work.
00:41:14
Speaker
So I'm finding lots of examples out there, but I'm deliberately looking for stuff and know where to look. You need to actually be asking the common people going, are you seeing more of this? Not asking specialists who go, no, actually, I look for this stuff. And I think that's kind of endemic issue in our profession. When someone becomes interested in conspiracy theories, they start looking for examples of them in the literature.
00:41:42
Speaker
they suddenly find a lot more than they were expecting to find, and thus they think it's a major issue. But it might only be a case of we've just not been looking in the right direction, and the stuff has just been in the background, but at a low level, since time immemorial. Yeah, selective perception is going on there too. I mean, I will say this, is that I started a Google Alert on a bunch of terms about nine years ago.
00:42:12
Speaker
with conspiracy and conspiracy theory being two of them. I used to get back about five articles a day that had the term conspiracy theory in it from Google. Since that time, particularly after 2015, 2016, it's about 100 a day. So journalists are writing about this a lot more than they ever did.
00:42:37
Speaker
previously and you could do other, you know, you could look at individual news outlets too. You go to the New York Times, say how much are they, how many articles mentioned conspiracy theory in the last year versus 20, 30, 40 years ago. And you find it's a lot more now. So that's happening. We are paying, the press is paying more attention. I think it's also clear that prominent political elites are engaging in this more. I say, I say that,
00:43:06
Speaker
largely just because of Trump and a few others who engage in this rhetoric. I don't think there have been clear studies on looking at large swaths of political elites over time and then tracking it. But I'm pretty comfortable in saying just with Trump's influence and a few other politicians influence that this has become a bigger form of political communication and rhetoric in the last few years.
00:43:35
Speaker
But with that being said, that's different than saying the public believes it more. So just because the media reports on something and just because politicians engage with it more doesn't mean more people are believing in it. And it could very well just be a case of activation where politicians are trying to activate something with the conspiratorial rhetoric that's already there. So they're not changing minds.
00:44:03
Speaker
Instead, what they're doing is just trying to pull people into their coalition who are already copacetic with this whatever theory they want to talk about at this time. And there are good examples of this. A lot of the candidates who are, quote unquote, linked to QAnon running for Congress or whatnot have tweeted out QAnon hashtags and whatnot.
00:44:26
Speaker
Well, that's bad. And I don't think that's a good thing. But when you asked them a little bit about what some of them have said as well, I'm just reaching out to that community. I'm not necessarily a believer.
00:44:38
Speaker
So they're using it as a signal but they're not expressing a belief and it's not true they're trying to change anyone's minds either. They're just trying to activate people who already exist. Yes and I mean this is actually I think a very good point that just because someone
00:44:56
Speaker
makes a vague reference or a hand gesture which may signal to the Q community they're aware of them, doesn't make them a true believer, they actually might be acting very insincerely to bring those people on board. I mean we saw that here with the deputy leader of the opposition party just
00:45:15
Speaker
asking questions about the government's response to COVID-19 in a way which was a dog whistle towards conspiracy theories, even though Jerry Brownlee said, I'm not being a conspiracy theorist, I'm just asking questions. Yeah, so that's, that is absolutely going on. But it's, I think the media is making some issues, some issues here too, is that you have had some people
00:45:42
Speaker
So I'll give you an example of this. I was interviewed about a California legislator in the state house who tweeted save the children, hashtag save the children. And this had gotten bound up with some QAnon stuff in the weeks previous because there were some save the children rallies and there were some QAnon people engaged with this and whatnot.
00:46:05
Speaker
But the reason why this legislature had tweeted something would save the children on it was because the legislature was voting on legislation that would at least limit the amount of time someone would be labeled as a sex offender after a conviction. So she was against that and she put out, we shouldn't pass the stuff and hashtag save the children.
00:46:33
Speaker
So then major news outlets did stories on her where they said, well, you know, she's engaging in QAnon rhetoric. And they called me and they said, what do you say about this? I said, well, I don't see the QAnon rhetoric. I said, it could be something related to QAnon, but you don't know until you ask. And you're just making an assumption that somehow this is indicative of that when it's not. And so they got in touch with the person's office and they said, no, we're not QAnon at all. We just want to save children.
00:47:02
Speaker
And of course the study goes, excuse me, the story runs anyway in the news outlets and they say, oh, well, she's now endorsing QAnon. It's like, well, she said she's not. She hasn't said anything QAnon specific, yet you're making this claim anyway. Now it could be true, but you just don't have any evidence for it. So, and I understand how politicians might be coy with these sorts of things, right? And I get it.
00:47:30
Speaker
You know, unless, if she's gonna say she's not supporting QAnon.
00:47:36
Speaker
and you don't have any specific QAnon references, then you shouldn't be drawing this connection. So, in that interview that you did with David Farrier, you did kind of suggest that, given that you keep pointing these things out to the media, but the media's not paying any attention to
Media Motivations in Reporting
00:47:55
Speaker
it, that they might actually be deliberately mangling both the stats and the story, which sounds a little bit conspiratorial,
00:48:04
Speaker
What's your reaction to that kind of claim? I'll be a little bit general just on this. So I did my dissertation on media coverage and how a lot of it is driven by profit incentives, right?
00:48:31
Speaker
I'm cynical about the media to begin with. I don't think they're involved in a conspiracy, but I think there are a lot of factors that drive news coverage outside of just importance to our democratic society. I guess the best way for me to approach is to say, I get very concerned
00:48:58
Speaker
when I'm asked to either take the side of the mainstream media or the side of conspiracy theorists. I don't think the answer to something wrong in the media is to go believe a bunch of conspiracy theories. At the same time, I don't think the answer to believing a bunch of conspiracy theories is to go read the mainstream media.
00:49:22
Speaker
because mainstream media, whether it's news or entertainment, has a bunch of conspiracy crap in there anyway. And I could run down a long list, whether it's the Washington Post running all sorts of UFO nonsense in the last few months, or the Animal Planet channel running Bigfoot and mermaid conspiracy theories, or the History Channel running alien conspiracy theories. Even the mainstream stuff has their toe dipped in into it.
00:49:51
Speaker
And even if you say you're supposed to believe official sources all the time, I mean, the question is, well, which one? Because we have a lot of official sources like the president or other politicians who are engaging in conspiracy theories and can't always be trusted.
Trusting Media Sources
00:50:06
Speaker
And what fact checkers say is they lie all the time. And mainstream media, they make a lot of mistakes. And that's not to say that they're bad and shouldn't be trusted at all.
00:50:18
Speaker
Let's just say that the media has, there's a lot of incentives that drive their coverage. They don't get things right all the time. Sometimes they get things wrong and sometimes they refuse to admit it. And sometimes they just make claims that don't have evidence to back it up. So they're the best we've got in terms of information coming out on a deadline that has some semblance of tether to truth. But
00:50:44
Speaker
I'm not going to tell people, trust the mainstream news all the time. I'm not going to do that. And generally what I'll say is, OK, if you have several outlets reporting the same thing with underlying data backing up those claims, then you should put stock in it. But until that time, just say, OK, this is what they're reporting.
00:51:07
Speaker
And we'll see how it pans out over time. See, to my mind, this just confirms my hypothesis. The only reliable news outlet is the National Enquirer, because you always know what you're going to get. It is of consistent quality. It may be consistently bad, but at least it's consistent. It's consistent. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's the thing. These are tougher questions than I think we let on. It's like, what should I believe about the world?
00:51:35
Speaker
There's no easy answer to that. Who should I trust? There's no easy answer to that. I mean, we can all say there's gonna be better and more sources, right? But nothing's gonna come easy. I mean, the news is evolving, events change, things have to, we're gonna update our conclusions over time. Conclusions are hard to come to that are accurate. Even science where this is what we do, it's hard.
00:52:03
Speaker
So this isn't something where we should be like, well, there's just one easy go-to source and everything they say is true. No, sorry. Yes, you're talking to an epistemologist. This is my bread and butter.
00:52:17
Speaker
Yeah. Well, thank you, Joe. That has been a wide ranging conversation about QAnon, the media, and why we should trust only the National Enquirer. So I think everyone's learned a very important lesson. One, you don't like the media.
00:52:34
Speaker
Two, polling data is variable at the best of times because, frankly, there's these polls and those polls. And the National Enquirer's story about the skull with only one eye socket is the only thing we should take as being gospel truth at this time.
00:52:50
Speaker
Now, I mean, just to not overstate, I mean, I don't hate the media. And like I said, to David Ferrier, I'm not, I'm not trying to be dogmatic about anything, but you get a lot of data. And then you say, okay, am I going to go with the data? Or am I going to go with people saying stuff? I'm going to go with the data until such time as the data changes. Fine. And I'm not going to fault journalists for getting things wrong. Sometimes I think they they're well intentioned and they work on a deadline and
00:53:19
Speaker
you know, they do the best they can with what they have. So it's just one of those things where, you know, we got to do the best we can with what we have. Which are very wise words. Thank you, John. Thank you.
00:53:42
Speaker
So Joshua, what did you think? What are your thoughts, your feelings, your attributions, your artistic merits, your theveve, your fandango? I'll stop you there.
00:53:58
Speaker
First of all, how does Joe manage to stay sounding so cheerful when he must be having this conversation probably several times a day, every day, and probably has done so for the last month or so? I think in this case it's because when you're having that conversation with a friend who knows exactly what the issues are and agrees with you, it's a lot easier to hash those things out than it would be to talk to an incredulous journalist. I think in that case
00:54:28
Speaker
That probably explains Joe's jolly moodle. That being said, Joe is a fairly even-keeled person at the best of times. I just imagine that having that same conversation week in, week out, must become tiresome eventually. You would think so.
00:54:44
Speaker
No, but what did I think? I don't think either of you use the term explicitly, but confirmation bias, if I remember my cognitive biases, seem to come up a bit. That seemed to be one of his explanations for why QAnon is popping up in the news an awful lot more than it used to, even if it isn't in reality much more prevalent, just the idea that if you go looking for it, you'll find it.
00:55:12
Speaker
And the one point you made about having these rallies, sort of generic rallies, where you'll find a QAnon crowd there, reminded me of the phenomenon that's been around forever, as far as I know, where anytime you get a vaguely sort of left-wing rally here in New Zealand, for instance,
00:55:31
Speaker
as well as people rallying to that cause, you'll also have the various sort of fringe groups that pop up and try to insinuate themselves into every rally. What are the water ones? There's the one group about water control here, I can't remember what it is, they were always everywhere.
00:55:50
Speaker
Yeah, if you put it into that context, then suddenly it does seem a lot less sort of alarming and a lot less new, I suppose. Yes, I think we kind of touched on that with the Notability criterion. Because it's such a notable movement, it doesn't need to be prevalent to be newsworthy.
00:56:09
Speaker
But the problem is, once something becomes newsworthy, then you start seeing it everywhere. And that's where the confirmation bias comes in. Once you're told that, oh, QAnon is everywhere, then suddenly you're going, oh, yeah, I saw a QAnon tweet the other day in a way which you probably wouldn't have even noticed if someone hadn't brought it to your attention. So there's a kind of selective attention going on as well. Yeah. And yes, again, sort of
00:56:40
Speaker
The idea that while this appears new, it's possibly just the newest version of a phenomenon that's been around forever. I mean, people worried about the fact that you've got QAnon as being elected to office at the moment. But in a slightly smaller scale example, how many elected officials were Obama berthers, the current president notwithstanding? I assume that there have probably been people who believe all sorts of
00:57:04
Speaker
of weird conspiracy theories elected to office throughout the history of politics ever. And maybe sometimes that's mentioned and sometimes it just isn't. Yeah, I mean, it is one of those things where some theories catch on and some don't. No one talks about the Iraqi Dinar theory, even though there are still enough people out there engaging in that weird currency transaction to be concerning.
00:57:32
Speaker
But yes, once you get into that sort of the disconnect between what the polling data seems to show and in particular people's personal experiences, I know we've talked in the past about David Faria seems very concerned about this sort of stuff and possibly because he's seen specific instances of individuals going down the rabbit hole.
00:57:57
Speaker
Um, and you can find plenty of stories online of, uh, you know, my, my, my parents went insane. My partner, my partner became a full-on Q person and so on and so forth. All these, there's the, what is, what's the Reddit group called? It's not, it's not QAnon widows because it's about families in general, but there are specific sites devoted to people talking about how they've lost touch with relatives because of QAnon. Um,
00:58:26
Speaker
And I thought in the light of those personality predictors that Joe mentioned, the sort of the psychological traits that were, what was the triangle called? The something triangle of those three particular traits that most strongly correlated with QAnon. I do wonder
00:58:48
Speaker
Like, these anecdotes are always expressed as my perfectly intelligent relatives suddenly became QAnoners, but I wonder maybe there are bits that the people telling these anecdotes leave out, or maybe weren't aware of in the first place?
00:59:04
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, there's also the way, as you point out, the way the narrative is framed probably also changes the nature of the story. What else struck to me? The way Joe was able to actually sort of defend his methods,
Reliability of Polling Results
00:59:20
Speaker
in particular, it was good to see the idea that this isn't just, you know, this survey shows blah, which is like the one that you brought up that we mentioned last week.
00:59:33
Speaker
He has a series of surveys over time, so there's a lot more robustness. Although I'm sure you've talked about this before when we've mentioned Joe. How often does he do these surveys? I think it's three to four times a year. Right. And he's been doing them for quite a while now, hasn't he? Yes. Yes. I mean, he started polling on QAnon when he became interested in QAnon. So he's been polling on that question for quite some time.
01:00:04
Speaker
In that case, he does seem to have the ammunition to actually say, this isn't a freak finding. There is a degree of consistency here and a degree of reliability.
01:00:20
Speaker
So it is nice to be able to, because you could always imagine the situation where, you know, my poll says this, well, my poll says that. We see that all over the place in different contexts. But actually being able to say, my poll says this, well, my series of polls that I've been conducted several times a year for several years are all saying this, does give one a lot more confidence in what he has to say. Although moving on to another point,
01:00:46
Speaker
One thing that did seem to be a bit of a problem is simply the way QAnon is defined. Like, for instance, now this is something that's come up in the Patreon episodes. I don't think we've talked about it in the main episode, but we've talked briefly a little bit about people discussing the phenomenon of
01:01:06
Speaker
QAnon is online sort of disavowing real life QAnon protests and suggesting that maybe they're paid actors or false flaggy, who knows what. And we saw a couple of different takes on that. One sort of saying, oh, they're just, you know, they're online warriors, and they're getting freaked out by seeing this thing happen in real life. And then another person said, well, no, actually, if you look at how Q was when it formed, it was very much the idea of the thing of it's all going to be taken care of
01:01:34
Speaker
for you, you don't have to worry about this. But it seemed a little bit weird because sort of one of these people was looking at QAnon's earliest beginnings, whereas some other people were looking at the way it's turned into now, and there's been a hell of a lot of change and mutation and all sorts of things being drawn in.
01:01:51
Speaker
And so in particular, Joe seemed to talk about QAnon as baby eating Satanists who harvest children's adrenochrome running the country and Donald Trump is going to take them down, whereas other people
01:02:08
Speaker
You know, there are other ways of looking at QAnon. Some originally, again, going back to the beginnings, it was a lot more just political. Donald Trump is going to lock up Hillary Clinton and Obama and George Soros and all of those people whose politics you hate before the celebrity elites and the the mole children and the adrenochrome came into it.
01:02:28
Speaker
So I do wonder if maybe there's something there in the fact that depending on how you define and describe QAnon and the questions, maybe you would get different results. So I think, and I need to go back and check.
01:02:42
Speaker
the questions he's been using, particularly for the Pew Research Center stuff. I don't think the questions bake in the baby eating Satanism version of QAnon. I think it's more a polling question about, have you heard about QAnon?
01:02:58
Speaker
So I don't think his polling data relies on defining QAnon in a particular way. It is striking that he kind of characterizes QAnon as having these really extreme beliefs, and then as we saw in the interview, associates those extreme beliefs with either narcissistic or psychologically troubled characteristics. So there's a kind of
01:03:22
Speaker
I mean, I use a weird term here. There's a particularly pejorative gloss on QAnon belief there. Now, we both take it that QAnon belief is kind of pejorative in the first instance, but Joe's is a much more extreme pejorative gloss on QAnon, and that it narrows the subset of QAnon believers down to
01:03:43
Speaker
this really extreme baby eating Satanist view. Also, I actually think we should probably be talking about the larger cohort, which as you point out, may just include people who think that there are operatives in the state working against the deep state, working with Donald Trump to bring it down. One of whom or several of whom is this operative called Q who communicates with the outside world.
01:04:08
Speaker
That's a much more plausible version of QAnon, and is probably the one that we should be interrogating and investigating. Because my suspicion is, most people who believe in QAnon believe in that more general hypothesis, and only a few people are committed to the sex pedophiles rule the world hypothesis.
01:04:33
Speaker
Yeah, so those were all the points that struck out to me. It's always good to listen to Joe doing his thing, and he's always interesting to hear from. You mentioned that you've been talking to a bunch of journalists and stuff. What have people been saying in terms of
01:04:52
Speaker
what they think about how prevalent QAnon is and all that sort of stuff. So I mean, most of the discussions I'm having with journalists at the moment are discussions around COVID-19 conspiracy theories with a little bit of a faint towards QAnon here and there.
01:05:09
Speaker
What I'm seeing is the kind of thing that Joe has been seeing, which is you discuss the data, such as the stuff which is coming out of the disinformation project through TPM. And the reaction is, but that doesn't reconcile with my experience on things like Facebook.
01:05:28
Speaker
Now as I said at the top of the show we do have a limitation with the project with TPM at the moment we're only scraping Twitter because Twitter has a publicly available API which allows us to harvest a large amount of data, Facebook does not, and people are going oh well maybe things aren't bad on Twitter but maybe they're bad on Facebook and my reaction to that has been well that might be the case but
01:05:55
Speaker
polls and polling data like that which Joe produces indicates it actually probably isn't and confirmation bias is playing a bigger role in your stories than you think. But I am seeing the same kind of reaction Joe is getting when you start talking about the issue. Many people in the media go no but that can't be the case because my anecdotal evidence indicates and it's the case of well
01:06:23
Speaker
I mean, it's fine that you've got anecdotal evidence, but the more robust evidence here is actually looking at polls of what people believe. Now, of course, it might be the case that things are literally different down in our part of the world, Joe is polling Americans.
01:06:41
Speaker
And that being said, Joe also doesn't think that given polls done overseas, America is all that exceptional when it comes to belief in conspiracy theories. So it seems to follow that we probably are seeing the same effects here, but it might be the case things are different here. But I am seeing the same kind of reaction that Joe gets when he talks to journalists about this issue.
01:07:05
Speaker
Well, there you go. Well, we better bring things to a close because the episode is drawing on and we don't wish to test people's patience any more than we normally do. But before we go, of course, we will be recording a bonus episode for our patrons as soon as we're done here. What are we going to be talking about this week?
01:07:25
Speaker
We're going to be talking about Joe Rogan's move to Spotify, and what didn't go with him. We'll be checking in on the victims of nerve gas poisonings, and we'll also be asking whether the Saudis are causing issues for a 9-11 investigator. Can't imagine why they'd do that.
01:07:46
Speaker
But, if you'd like to find out, be one of our patrons, if you're not already. If you're a patron, good for you. We make no secret of the fact that we like you better than everyone else. Which isn't to say we don't like everyone else who might happen to be listening, for you are our audience, and give us a reason to exist.
01:08:08
Speaker
as mortal beings. But if you'd like to become a patron, go to patreon.com and search for the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy, and that's all I have to say on the matter. And that's all I have to say on the matter as well. In that case, I think it just remains for me to say goodbye. And for me to say that 76% of me is saying goodbye.
01:08:36
Speaker
You've been listening to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy, starring Josh Addison and Dr. M.R. Extended, which is written, researched, recorded and produced by Josh and Em. You can support the podcast by becoming a patron via its Podbean or Patreon campaigns. And if you need to get in contact with either Josh or Em, you can email them at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com or check their Twitter accounts, Mikey Fluids and Conspiracism.
01:09:37
Speaker
And remember, it's just a step to the left.