5G Virus Conspiracy Theory Fueled by Coordinated Effort
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Is there a correlation with anything that gets popular then sees an uptick in 'inauthentic activity'. I know most of the attention is going to be looking into 'dangerous' buzzwords but I'm curious to see what the standard baseline is for every trend, then seeing how it compares. Especially FUDy topics.
Social media 'bots' by their very nature would be picking up on any trend in order to boost their positions from which to seed other stuff. Assuming that's what they do (and actually have an audience beyond other bots which follow them)...
One thing being spread by bots doesn't point to a cause/effect by itself.
> the previous 24 hours, there had been more than 50,000 posts about the topic on Twitter and Reddit
I've seen a ton of people talking about 5G also, almost entirely making light of it or directly making fun of people who believe it. It's now commonly being cited whenever 'conspiracies' and COVID come up.
The raw statistics don't really scare me much, especially 50k".
I remember since I was in high school when the first cell towers (well before 3G) were going up and there was a small campaign by a girl in my class who lived on a farm next to another farm which got one. They were claiming it caused cancer and other stuff.
5G/cell towers aren't a very unique point of blame as much as people flailing about in the face of a mystery and pointing the finger at the same small group of common enemies from the past (not that the real 'enemy' isn't actually among them, but it's safe to be skeptical when they are brought up...).
But even that adds up to a large amount of lost energy and time that could have been used to discuss other things.
Edit for response:
In what ways might mocking 5G conspiracy theories on reddit have a negative political effect?
Anyone discussing 5G in a non-serious manner = -15 social credit score
What's interesting about this is that RT.com in 2018 and 2019 was a big source behind the "5G will give you cancer" disinformation. Links to several of those stories, and to their current stories disputing the virus claims, in this earlier comment [1].
Why would Russia flip from trying to get people in the US afraid of 5G to trying to calm 5G fears? I have no idea.
The reason that this is probably somewhat conspiratorial, in the sense of being planned by a clandestine group, is because RT is well-known to be part of Russia's state propaganda machine [0]. Trusting RT either way, without examining their claims and sources carefully, is a bad idea.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RT_(TV_network)#Propaganda_cla...
So how is the neighbouring comment wrong or worth ignoring? Even tho the profit motive may not be there, RT value proposition to the kremlin is the same as vice, buzzfeed, and huffpost except that instead of ads, they seek get the audience to the site to expose to them to the kremlim approved narrative.
Well the neighboring comment raised none of the points you have. The neighboring comment did nothing more than draw attention to the username/karma of the 'jsjddbbwj' user, and insinuated that the user was part of a conspiracy by calling the comment ironic.
This is just one giant misinformation campaign directed towards derailing informed consent and an informed electorate. Every little bit helps in that overarching plan.
Just like with any good bar brawl by the time it gets underway for real nobody knows who they are fighting or what they were fighting for or who started it. For all you know the people that started it are already in another bar doing the same thing.
alternative theory: they look for fringe topics trending and picked up the narrative to drive views.
If it’s not as simple as that, then the only intricate manipulation I can think of is that by playing It up, then playing it down, you normalize the need to treat the issue with credibility. Why is a news agency lending their name to even address this?
"Apparatus and method for remotely monitoring and altering brain waves" [1] https://patents.google.com/patent/US3951134A/en
"Method and system for eliminating fighting strength of opposing combatant using electromagnetic wave" [2] https://patents.google.com/patent/CN106643287A/en
non-ionizing radiation thank you
Russia has no opinion either way and you're mis-interpreting everyday journalism as some kind of massive conspiracy, which is why it makes no sense.
I looked at the first video in the comment you link to. The story is actually "Group of scientists warn 5G network can pose health dangers", and provides a clip of Dr Sharon Goldberg talking in the Senate about 4G as evidence.
She says:
"Wireless radiation has biological effects, period. This is no longer a subject for debate when you look at PubMed and other peer reviewed literature."
and goes on to cite a bunch of papers that (she says) look at the effects.
As far as I can tell she's some sort of doctor who campaigns against mobile towers.
Now look at it from the perspective of ordinary journalists. RT tries to find stories that are interesting yet 'under-reported'. Imagine in this case there are no Russian masterminds or calls from Putin; just everyday journos who have to fill airtime with something. The clip starts with the host of the show basically admitting he has no idea what 5G is, that he's not a technical kinda guy, he only heard about it that afternoon and his entire knowledge of it comes from reading the summary on Wikipedia. His angle is "it sounds too good to be true so where's the catch?". Some random correspondent then launches into the clip of the doctor.
You don't need any fancy conspiracy theories to understand what's going on here. All you need are people who know nothing about technology looking for something interesting to talk about. They see "experts" testify before Congress citing the peer reviewed, published papers of other "experts" (journos know that this is the gold standard), and that's their permission to talk about it.
All we're seeing here is the fact that you can find peer reviewed published academic papers for a huge array of bizarre ideas. It's just not a serious filter on the flow of research but journalists don't know that - academics themselves are forced to filter it using entirely subjective notions like perceived reputation, which can vary wildly depending on who is asked.
The only reason RT specifically seemed to focus on it is their pitch is that they are outside the CNBC/MSNBC/CNN/etc groupthink.
Why are these conspiracy theories about 5G being spread?
If the why involves geopolitics and economics, you just have to look at who has the most to lose from this, factoring in that China is now the cheapest option for this tech(not sure if they are the leaders, but certainly will be the cheapest with a state-funded subsidy).
HN being a critical thinking community, it is fair to postulate theories from an economic perspective. I don't think anybody will try to sell "long-life milk powder" during such discourse.
I am sure 5G is spreading like wildfire for similar reasons ( though admittedly, this one is kinda silly, when there are actual things to worry about ... like say Mnuchin suddenly being able to disburse billions of dollars with a friendly IG, but I digress ).
It is amusing that the typical "skeptics" and "critical thinkers" online never notice. Their skepticism consists of swallowing the narrative whole, then insisting that the conspiracy is real but twice as evil as reported.
You're likely in for a rude awakening if you expatriate. Things aren't perfect in the US but for someone in the middle class on a dev salary it's naive to think there are many places where you'd be substantially better off.
So what? No matter where I go, I'm still going to be ethnically Chinese. If the US expels people like me, I assume Europe, etc. will follow suit.
I'm often reminded that we are just a couple hundred thousand years of human on top of many millions of years of monkey, and that we should be patient with ourselves.
Sorry, but this is an extraordinarily naive point of view.
The "fake news" meme is fake "news". Nothing new about it, just new players entering an old game.
edit: I almost think it is like comparing invention of wheel to today's cars.
Russia at least has form in trying to pour fuel on existing controversies or divisions in Western societies.
In the US, with Trump, and in the UK, with Brexit, they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. They had also a lot of smaller victories in Eastern Europe.
Your version makes slightly more sense at least.
This conditioning spreads, children are literally meme machines. Bit by bit faulty pieces of information get lodged in gullible little brains. By the time you reach the age where critical thinking skills become important the whole world around you has become infested with lies and half truths, and the bits stored in your head are full of logic holes and trash.
So then, at the ripe old age of 25, a person with no scientific background receives from a number of directions at once something that is not supported by facts. By default, they are going to do what they've always done: accept it as though it is true. And they will spread it around, a click here, a retweet there, a like over here. Then, once they are invested in it, just like with Santa Clause there are always going to be some individuals that refuse to give up the lie. They persist in believing it because that's easier than to give it up.
It's how cults are formed and how people end up with false beliefs that cause them to do really bad things. Like kill others. The 5G Virus Conspiracy is falling into very fertile soil. Against a backdrop of low level continuous distrust of the authorities, the vast gap between poor and rich and the number of absolutely outrageous things that we have told people to accept as fact this is not all that surprising.
If we want to change this we will have to start by ensuring that what we tell people from a very early age is the truth, and that lying and spreading a falsehood as such would be - again - seen as something dishonorable.
This of course is entirely not acceptable to large fractions of society. So we will have to live with the fact that some people become so gullible that they will believe anything that they are being told by some guy in a frock, a labcoat or who they happen to resonate with. Critical thinking skills are like other skills: you have to learn, and then you have to practice them the rest of your life to make sure you retain them.
Until then you will see these conspiracy efforts have great success and this should not surprise us at all.
Specific to what you're talking about there is a bifurcation (really a series of them) when the system detects the invalid data and re-calibrates. Often this takes the form of a "conversion experience", and some people build specific rituals (initiations) to try to engineer them artificially.
He once described society as "open warfare between competing gangs of magicians" or something like that. By "magicians" he meant people who deliberately program the "reality tunnels" (his jargon) of others.
What you're talking about, in the context of RAW's models, is a kind of transcendent goal: allegiance to truth itself. (And critical thinking, evidence-based data collection, etc. All that good stuff.) You're part of the great anti-conspiracy.
- - - -
Now that I think about it I seem to recall that RAW had a piece where he talks about experienceing the Santa Claus disillusionment. I think George Carlin does in his autobiography.
The greatest strength is perhaps the lower impact of a single tower failure.
Do we have any reason to believe or disbelieve their methods?
For anyone curious, the conspiracy theory seems to have some varieties, with the one I've most often seen pushed not so much claiming that 5G masts somehow directly cause coronavirus, but rather that coronavirus is a false-flag campaign designed to create broad popular support for a vaccine which, thanks to magnetic particles and/or nanotechnology depending on who's telling the lie right now, will enable mass population control via 5G masts.
I've been a hobbyist collector of conspiracy theories since high school. From that perspective, and absent any sort of context, I have to admit this one's inspired. But I gradually lost my pleasure in that hobby, as thoughtless social media operations turned conspiracy theories from a cute but harmless fringe preoccupation into a means of disinformation with the power to move whole societies. From that perspective, this is truly vile.
Preface 2: I do think we should tend to err on the side caution. I fear in 40 years we will look back at our blind rush into many forms of tech incredulously (ie. can you believe in 2020 everyone had wifi installed in their homes? next to their kids?!?)
Having said all that, who benefits from the "anti-5G" coordinated effort?
So to me it's always seemed rational to at least revisit the question and reaffirm it's still fine.
We've reversed course on plenty of things that were once believed to be fine, or once believed to be harmful! Trans fats, asbestos, lead, sun, saturated fats, sugar, exercise, etc etc.
Though, the antenna in your phone exposes you to more radiation than the base station, so that's probably the more important question. Perhaps with higher base station density, the mobile devices actually reduce output.
>We've reversed course on plenty of things that were once believed to be fine
That is my concern. Specifically that the "non-ionizing radiation" is a red-herring. Its possible that EMF exposure effects cells in another way that we've yet to realize. As a poor analogy: Arguing that being exposed to constant visible light on the basis that "Light is non-ionizing" misses the fact that constant visible light disrupts the circadian rhythm which has a host of other ill-effects.
To be clear, I'm not suggesting that we ban something on a fear, but given the enormous potential cost if we get it wrong, it should be thoroughly studied.
To preface: I don't think there's any evidence at this time that standard levels of non-ionizing electromagnetic radiation are harmful to humans.
But it's not inconceivable that there could be some harm caused which we're not aware of yet and which is eventually discovered in the future. The body and brain are extremely complex and not fully understood, etc. Molecular biology is sensitive. It's not implausible that there could hypothetically be certain chemical reactions or cell processes which are subtly disrupted by certain frequency bands at certain amplitudes.
I personally don't think there will be such a finding, but people still need to keep an open mind, I think.
It definitely needs to be thoroughly studied. But to my understanding, the past decades of study into it haven't revealed any harmful effects so far, at the energy levels that humans are generally exposed to. I do think it should continue to be studied in different ways, but given the current knowledge, I don't think people should feel very concerned about it.
Someone exposed to low levels of lead poisoning over many years may not notice anything's happening to them. If after 10 years their memory isn't quite what it used to be, yet it's still mostly fine, they'll likely just chalk it up to aging.
A KW of HF when you touch it or less than that at GHz+ ranges and you will do real damage to tissue, I have the scar to prove that one.
The induced power falls off very rapidly with distance, especially for omni-directional radiators. The 120' antennae that are common on cell phone installations have relatively low efficiency and 100W or so of radiated power per antenna, maybe 105W at the foot of the mast but unless there is some kind of giant impedance mismatch and if there is then you'll just fry an end stage.
I think so, too, and this is what the science currently appears to show. But my point is really much more of a general one: there are always unknown unknowns out there. It's not totally implausible that it could one day be discovered that there's some strange mechanism of action that we had no idea was present, like some sort of subtle cell machinery disruption for a specific kind of cell from certain frequencies and amplitudes which otherwise wouldn't cause any damage through sheer aggregate photon exposure, or something like that.
To reiterate, I think that that's unlikely. But I'm saying just as a general principle, it's hard to assess the potential harm of something purely based on your own subjective feeling about it, because if it actually is affecting you, you often really may not have any way of being cognizant of that fact. It's actually more likely that that would be the case the more likely that it's believed to be safe, because dramatic effects would increase the odds of the effect showing up in studies. There's a huge buffer between where you may still feel totally fine and functional over years and where you start to actually notice some harmful effects. Many people with low-level chronic exposure to some harmful thing may remain in that buffer zone forever.
For example, the water I drink has fluoride in it, and from everything I've read I don't believe the low levels that are in the water have a negative impact on health. But if somehow the scientific consensus eventually turns out to be wrong and there actually were some subtle impact to cognition that accrued over decades, would I be aware of this just by analyzing my own behavior and functionality over the years? Probably not. I don't think fluoridated water is harmful, but I also acknowledge it's quite possible I wouldn't be able to know if it's harmful or not just by introspection alone.
Go through the cited papers / patents [1] https://patents.google.com/patent/CN106643287A/en [2] https://patents.google.com/patent/US3951134A/en
I'm not pushing EM->DNA or really any particular theory. But I try to remain aware of all the health blunders we've made in the past hundred years.
1) Misdirection. Someone trying to muddy the waters of blame related to SARS-CoV-2. In that case, almost anything other than the truth will be useful. Chaos of information is ideal if that's your goal. Try to shatter the consensus. Unleash, entice, the people prone to extremes on conspiracy theories, let them do the work of spraying non-sense everywhere. Moderately effective and at very little cost, all they require is a gentle nudge at a time like this.
2) Degrade competitors when it comes to their deployment of technology (5G in this case). A small erosion is a large potential benefit over time. Once you have an advantage, keep pressing it forward.
There are few things we should proclaim with certainty, and "5g is 100% biologically harmless" doesn't seem to be one of them, yet.
>who benefits from the "anti-5G" coordinated effort?
Some:
Scientist who've staked their reputation against 5g, disadvantaged telecom co's, conspiracy theorists/media who prey on fear, gov't who don't like the social direction connectivity is taking us (populus' can 'wake up' increasingly quickly).
Casting the narrative into an easier to manipulate one
In attempt to answer this question honestly, and I doubt any of these industries are actively pushing anti-5G propaganda, but cable companies, established cellular/wireless companies, and even the WiFi industry will benefit from an anti-5G message. They will all be affected if 5G lives up to it's promises.
Huawei is in danger of being locked out of 5G network infrastructure in some countries, such as Canada. Aside from pressure from allied countries to bar Huawei from participating in its 5G network, public opinion is also overwhelmingly against Huawei thanks to the ongoing Meng affair, China's taking of hostages to secure Meng's release, as well as Huawei's legacy of corporate espionage targeting Canadian companies such as Nortel.
Huawei is now donating medical masks as part of a charm offensive. It's possible that whoever started this conspiracy theory is attempting to counter that charm offensive.
Edit: People above are wondering what might motivate people to start these rumours. Here's a likely reason, and it has been downvoted. Go figure.