Jan-Willem van Prooijen writes:

The great fire of Notre Dame on 15 April 2019 broke the hearts of culture lovers around the world. Parisians wept in public while the flames reduced large parts of this monumental cathedral to smouldering ashes. The French president Emmanuel Macron Tweeted a sentiment that not only French people felt: ‘Je suis triste ce soir de voir brûler cette part de nous’ (‘I feel sad tonight to see this part of us burn’). According to official sources, the fire was accidental, most likely due to technological malfunction. Yet, it was only a matter of time before the first conspiracy theories started to circulate on social media. Even before the fire was extinguished, conspirational websites such as 4chan began alleging that the fire had been started by the French government, Jews, or an Islamic terrorist group. Almost instantly, the charges spread to a receptive audience worldwide. It was the expected course of events. Big, impactful and shocking social events – a fire, a flood, a terrorist strike, a war, and so on – typically elicit conspiracy theories among large groups of citizens who question the official reading of the news.

Prominent figures at the radical Right promoted the conspiracy theory that the fire was a terrorist strike by radical Muslims. The far-Right political commentator Hal Turner saw a link between the Notre Dame fire and other recent fires in Christian churches in the United States, Australia and Russia. He claimed that these incidents were the result of ‘Islamic warfare’, and even posted a video suggesting that a Muslim was at the Notre Dame Cathedral when the fire began. Fact-checking later revealed that the person in the video was not a Muslim but a fire-fighter, wearing a helmet, mask and protective clothing. By that time, the video had already been re-Tweeted hundreds of times. In my own country, the Netherlands, the video also gained attention when it was re-Tweeted by Thierry Baudet, the new rising star of the Dutch populist Right.

Particularly in the past few years, conspiracy theories have been omnipresent on the internet and in social media. These modern forms of communication allow conspiracy theories to spread faster than ever, and make it easy for like-minded people to connect and form online echo chambers. As a result, the flat-Earth movement – endorsing the conspiracy theory that the Earth is actually flat and that scientists have been lying to the public for more than 500 years – is now an organised society with regular conferences. People can even book holidays that focus on conspiracy theories; the Conspira-Sea cruise, for instance, offers a one-week vacation on a cruise ship, including a programme filled with conspiracy speeches and discussions.

In the wake of Donald Trump’s election in the US and the Brexit vote in the UK, conspiracy theories have become a normal part of political discourse, particularly among supporters of populist movements. These movements typically portray a struggle between ‘corrupt elites’ and ‘the noble people’. The populist mindset facilitates conspiracy theories, assuming that elites deliberately impose terrorist strikes, economic crises or disease epidemics on the rest. It seems as if we now live in an age of conspiracism. More citizens than ever before seem to believe conspiracy theories, and our society provides an exceptionally fertile soil for them to flourish.

But is this really the case? Sure, conspiracy theories spread fast nowadays, and like-minded believers rapidly find each other online. But that doesn’t prove that the proportion of believers has actually increased, or that modern technologies are a root cause. In fact, a penchant for the conspiracy theory has been around as long as Homo sapiens has. [Continue reading…]