The contents of these hoaxes are new, but the core messages are not. In the Second World War, governments on both sides of the fight constructed massive departments just for the management and delivery of misinformation. Propaganda was a vital part of the Cold War battle as all sides looked for ways to gain advantage over an adversary that they would never be able to fight on the battlefield.  Hoaxes have always taken advantage of the latest technology, with the Catholic and Protestant churches first making use of the printing press in their sixteenth century fight for the hearts and minds of Europe. Since then, whether it was Pulitzer and Hearst using sensational headlines to grow readership, Vladimir Lenin using the cinema to sell Bolshevism, or Tokyo Rose convincing American GI’s to surrender to the Japanese, misinformation has played a significant role in shaping how people who own the means of information production weaponize language and images and then use them to wield power.

The reasons for why people believe misinformation also have not changed. Last December, psychologists at the University of Adelaide ran studies to figure out what kinds of people buy-in to conspiracies and hoaxes. They concluded that conspiracy belief was tied to people who had “elevated psychopathology scores, lower education, and who relied less on analytical thinking.”[1] Historians and theorists of propaganda have come up with other answers, disregarding the notion of group psychopathology and instead noting the power that misinformation can have in seducing people who might otherwise seem perfectly rational. First, people have good reason to be skeptical of those in power. There is often some nugget of truth to conspiracy theories. We have been lied to before, and there have been some crazy conspiracies that turned out to be true. There was the conspiracy theory that the U.S. Government was stealing dead bodies to do radiation testing in the 1950’s. That turned out to be true. Or what about the theory that the Dalai Lama was a CIA agent? Yes, he was on their payroll. Not only that, but people believe conspiracies and hoaxes because they confirm biases and build identity. They offer a shared enemy by which all “good people” are threatened.[2] Often, these hoaxes uphold the idea that our “freedom” (which is equated with free enterprise) is under attack, allowing believers to see themselves as being injured by a world that preys upon them.[3] This shared sense of “being injured in the struggle for freedom” builds a powerful group identity. And of course, once you are injured, you are justified in defending yourself.

What has changed is the level of saturation and spread of that misinformation. The conspiracy theory that the coronavirus was patented in 2015 has been reposted on Twitter at least 15,000 times (this number is from sites I could find and certainly is not a complete number). It was made into one Youtube video that has had over 2.6 million views, and there are many such videos. You would be hard pressed to find a news-aware American who hasn’t at least encountered this idea that the virus is a secret weapon that was made years ago by powerful people in the deep state.

In the past, whole populations could only be reached through radio, television, and film—all of which were funded by big corporations or governments and were subject to a certain amount of oversight. Now, “the truth” has become a commodity whose manufacture is determined by the market. Any person can post an idea or a video to the internet, and, regardless of its actual veracity, if it resonates with enough of the population, it will go viral (absolutely no pun intended). It will reach millions, confirming their sense of collective injury, and becoming a critical part of how they understand the world. The rise of market-driven “truths” has had massive, unexpected effects on mainstream media. To a large extent, the market now drives the news that broadcasters tell. Eventually, stations like Fox news and even the President repeat and legitimate these hoaxes until eventually, no one can tell what is true or false.

If there is a lesson in all of this it is that you should always check your sources, wait for corroborating evidence, and if a story confirms every bias that you have, there might be something wrong with it. They teach classes in high schools now on how to tell “fake news” from the real thing. But even “fake news” (a favorite phrase of President Trump) doesn’t actually mean fake news anymore; it simply means the-news-that-Trump-doesn’t-like.

I’m betting that eventually there will be a conspiracy theory that the whole coronavirus is a hoax constructed by liberals (probably Jewish liberals) to falsely discredit Trump and keep people home or under surveillance or away from the ballot box. A hoax built on the idea of a hoax. How meta.