Dear people of the internet, please, I’m begging you, check your sources. 🙏🥺
Whether you’re a FitPro and there’s an inspirational quote that resonated with you and you want to share it with clients via your professional platform, or you’re reposting aspirational content to your personal page or story as a means to find guidance and seeming clarity in these trying times, please, I’m asking you to dig in before you hit share, I’m imploring you to be a critical consumer and less reflexive reposter, and to think about your captive audience and reach, however small you think it might be. The same goes for the content that you’re liking, saving, and sending.
Becoming a new mom in the era of a global pandemic means I’ve been utterly dependent upon virtual support - my community is right here, behind my screen. We are all spending an unprecedented time at home, often in isolation, forging and seeking community in online spaces. In the past few months, weeks, and days, my timeline and my stories have been inundated with baseless conspiracy theories about the origins of the ongoing COVID-19 crisis and the public health response to it, and with posts encouraging us to “awaken” to the recent inevitable push for racial reckoning and justice by deliberately turning away from it. I’ve seen these posts spread from all ends of the political spectrum; they all invoke the same rhetoric, engage in the same logical fallacies, predate on our shared collective fears and anxieties in a moment of national sociocultural vulnerability, and have the same dubious origins.
Most recently, it’s been post after post telling followers to “wake up” to COVID as a “false flag” conspiracy to distract from the ongoing crisis and tragedy of child sexual exploitation. These posts have sprung up in relation to an entire larger universe of COVID “truthers” schilling pyramid scheme wares as magical panaceas for this global pandemic for a novel - read: NEWly discovered - strain of the human sars coronavirus. I’ve seen these posts from peers and friends, from influencers whose work I have long followed, and especially from folks working in the larger fitness and wellness industry - so forever altered by this pandemic. A few clicks on the source material for these widely disseminated reposts belies the true intentions of their creators - to disseminate disinformation rooted in racism, antisemitism, and white supremacy. These posts spread and gain popularity because they prey on our collective and individual anxiety in this uniquely challenging and trying moment of time, where we face intersecting and compounding crises day after day, with no clear end or solution in sight. These posts offer us hope, however twisted, that we can wish it all away by adhering to a different narrative. Just as a movement practice asks us to pause and notice, to grapple and reckon with our experiential embodiment, pause too, in the messaging you absorb and distribute.
When you come across or are sent a post making sensational claims of blame or offering a too-good-to-be-true solution, here are some basic things to watch for to ascertain legitimacy and value and interrogate their origin and intention:
Distrust, delegitimization, and demonization of accredited experts within the field
Failure to maintain appropriate scope of practice: content originator does not possess qualifications to speak as an authority in this arena, or claims them falsely
Scapegoating - especially pinpointing an ethno-religious minority or representatives thereof, i.e. specific references to George Soros, “globalist cabals,” or vague claims of orchestrated global elites etc.
False equivalencies (i.e. comparing longitudinal health outcomes rooted in America’s broken food systems as equivalent to social distancing, masks, and other sanitation measures taken in the midst of a global respiratory pandemic)
Harnessing of Cognitive Dissonance as a means of division: (claiming the reader cannot care about other social problems in the midst of a global pandemic, depiction of two social problems as mutually exclusive)
Deployment of racist tropes: see especially the terms “Black on Black crime,” “race war,” “race baiting”
Spiritual Bypassing and Toxic Positivity: claiming a pie-in-the-sky “higher consciousness” without acknowledgment of and agitation against material inequities here on earth
Confirmation bias and accusations of fact checking whether individual or institutional as equivalent to censorship and “proof” of an orchestrated conspiracy
Ignores conflicting data and/or only engages with divergent source material and opposing evidence via ad hominem attacks and Whataboutism, rather than engage in substantive, evidenced-based debate
Claimed martyrdom and victimhood by someone in actuality holding power and capital, whether material or sociocultural
Conflation of coincidence or causation with correlation
Use and reliance of anecdote over evidence in research methodology
Origins of claims for personal enrichment
This is by no means a comprehensive post, it’s an attempt for me to gather the pained pieces of my brain and heart. To learn more about the spread of disinformation on social media, and to curate an evidenced social feed, I highly recommend the following links and accounts:
The Great Unlearn: @thegreatunlearn
Check Your Privilege: ckyourprivilege
The Anti-Defamation League: @adl_nationa
So You Want to Talk About: @soyouwanttotalkabout
We are vulnerable to the media we consume and the rhetoric it espouses. With each save, share, and repost we widen the reach of toxic content, we exacerbate harm, we fail ourselves and our community. Let’s show up more effectively in our shared online spaces, and do better. Our lives, and the lives of those far, far more vulnerable quite literally depend on it.