Abbie Richards of @tofology is fighting conspiracies and disinformation. She created this Conspiracy Chart to show the progression of how people leave reality to start truly believing that the world is ruled by reptilian overlords and that the world is flat, etc.

I mean I’m firmly in the “We Have Questions” section of this and it’s fun to play in the “Unequivocally False But Mostly Harmless” section. Some of my favorite X-Files episodes explore that section! But once you start going beyond that it gets close to the dangerous point of no return. And if you have friends or family going down that QAnon road try and get them help.

It’s also important to note that it’s healthy to question things and research to learn the truth. Especially with so much misinformation out there, fact checking is very important. The trouble is that people don’t understand how to actually do that, and when they say “I did my own research”, they mean:

Anyway, here is what Abbie Richards of @tofology had to say about what’s going on right now with radical conspiracy theorists, followed by The Conspiracy Chart:

“The rioters in DC live in a different reality than you do. They didn’t wake up suddenly radicalized into believing untruths. This mentality depends on the rejection of mainstream authoritative sources. You slowly lose trust in media, government, anyone outside of your in-group. This isn’t because of what Trump said at the rally. This isn’t even just because of Trump (although he definitely facilitated it). This has been years in the making. Poor digital literacy, algorithms that value profit over humans, and extremist groups that hijacked social media enabled the radicalization of millions. And this isn’t going to go away with a Democratic government.”

Download full view here: The Conspiracy Chart pdf

Source: Abbie Richards of @tofology