Theoretical Article
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Hakikat-Sonrası Çağda Covid-19 Komplo Teorileri

Year 2022, Issue: 76, 227 - 244, 13.12.2022

Abstract

Covid-19 pandemisi, virüsün yayılmasını engellemek amacıyla devreye sokulan radikal uygulamalarla yalnız sağlık sistemi üzerinde değil ekonomik, politik ve sosyal anlamda önemli sonuçlar doğurarak dünya genelinde en önemli yapısal krizlerden birini tetikledi. Bu durum, pandeminin etkileri ve devletlerin baş etmek için uyguladığı yöntemler etrafında yalnız akademik çevrelerde değil, katılım için hiçbir eğitim veya profesyonel birikim istemeyen sosyal medya mecraları yoluyla toplumun her kesiminde çok sayıda tartışmaya neden oldu. Sonuç olarak bu dönem, virüsün hızlı yayılmasını devletlerin ve büyük ilaç şirketlerinin bir komplosu olduğu suçlamalarından pandeminin 5G gibi yeni iletişim teknolojilerini uygulamaya almak için ortaya atılmış bir aldatmaca olduğu iddialarına kadar çeşitli komplo teorilerine şahitlik etti. Bu durumun insanları yanlış yönlendirdiği ve virüsün yayılmasına karşı mücadeleyi tehlikeye attığı ortadadır. İlk bakışta yanlış bilginin yayılmasında suçlanması gerekenin yeni iletişim teknolojilerinin kullanımı olduğu ve çözümün de aldatmacaları önceden tespit edecek yeni aletler geliştirmekte bulunabileceği düşünülebilir. Her ne kadar sosyal medya komplo teorilerinin yayılımını kolaylaştırsa da insanların sosyal medya platformlarını bilginin bilgi çağında metalaşması süreciyle beraber gelişen ana akım medyaya olan güvensizlik nedeniyle ilk bilgi kaynağı olarak seçilmesi gerçeği göz önünde tutulursa sosyal medya asıl sebep olarak ele alınamaz. Bu makale, felsefenin bakış açısından hakikat sonrası dönemde komplo teorilerine yönelik eğilimin sosyopsikolojik mekanizmalarını Aydınlanma projesinin evrensel doğruları arayışına olan güvenin bilginin metalaşması ve sömürülmesine bağlı kaybedilmesi ile ilişkili incelemeyi amaçlıyor.

References

  • Abalakina‐Paap, M., Stephan, W. G., Craig, T., & Gregory, W. L. (1999). Beliefs in Conspiracies. Political Psychology, 20(3), 637–647. https://doi.org/10.1111/0162-895X.00160
  • Adair, S. (2010). The Commodification of Information and Social Inequality. Critical Sociology, 36(2), 243–263. https://doi.org/10.1177/0896920509357505
  • Adorno, T., & Horkheimer, M. (2002). Dialectic of Enlightenment. Stanford University Press.
  • Ahmed, W., Vidal-Alaball, J., Downing, J., & Seguí, F. L. (2020). COVID-19 and the 5G Conspiracy Theory: Social Network Analysis of Twitter Data. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 22(5), e19458. https://doi.org/10.2196/19458
  • Allcott, H., & Gentzkow, M. (2017). Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 31(2), 211–236. https://doi.org/10.1257/jep.31.2.211
  • Allington, D., Duffy, B., Wessely, S., Dhavan, N., & Rubin, J. (2020). Health-protective behaviour, social media usage and conspiracy belief during the COVID-19 public health emergency. Psychological Medicine, 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1017/S003329172000224X
  • Aps, P. (2019, August 22). COLUMN-Conspiracy theories risk becoming new currency of post-truth politics: Peter Apps. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/article/apps-conspiracy-idUSL5N25I3XI
  • Arendt, H. (1972). Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics, Civil Disobedience on Violence, Thoughts on Politics, and Revolution. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
  • Atran, S., & Norenzayan, A. (2004). Religion’s evolutionary landscape: Counterintuition, commitment, compassion, communion. The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 27(6), 713–730; discussion 730-770. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0140525x04000172
  • Bacon, F. (1905). Novum Organum. George Routledge & Sons.
  • Baldwin, D. A., & Baird, J. A. (2001). Discerning intentions in dynamic human action. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 5(4), 171–178. https://doi.org/10.1016/s1364-6613(00)01615-6
  • Bale, J. M. (2007). Political paranoia v. political realism: On distinguishing between bogus conspiracy theories and genuine conspiratorial politics. Patterns of Prejudice, 41(1), 45–60. https://doi.org/10.1080/00313220601118751
  • Bègue, L., Bushman, B. J., Giancola, P. R., Subra, B., & Rosset, E. (2010). “There is no such thing as an accident,” especially when people are drunk. Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin, 36(10), 1301–1304. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167210383044
  • Brotherton, R. (2017). Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories (Reprint edition). Bloomsbury Sigma.
  • Brotherton, R., & French, C. C. (2015). Intention Seekers: Conspiracist Ideation and Biased Attributions of Intentionality. PLoS ONE, 10(5). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0124125
  • Chomsky, N. (2011). Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda. Seven Stories Press.
  • De Dijn, H. (2013). Spinoza On Truth, Religion, and Salvation. The Review of Metaphysics, 66(3), 545–564. JSTOR.
  • Douglas, K. M., Sutton, R. M., Callan, M. J., Dawtry, R. J., & Harvey, A. J. (2016). Someone is pulling the strings: Hypersensitive agency detection and belief in conspiracy theories. Thinking & Reasoning, 22(1), 57–77. https://doi.org/10.1080/13546783.2015.1051586
  • Dwivedi, Y. K., Hughes, D. L., Coombs, C., Constantiou, I., Duan, Y., Edwards, J. S., Gupta, B., Lal, B., Misra, S., Prashant, P., Raman, R., Rana, N. P., Sharma, S. K., & Upadhyay, N. (2020). Impact of COVID-19 pandemic on information management research and practice: Transforming education, work and life. International Journal of Information Management, 55, 102211. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2020.102211
  • Grimes, D. R. (2020). Health disinformation & social media. EMBO Reports, 21(11), e51819. https://doi.org/10.15252/embr.202051819
  • Harvey, D. (1991). The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Wiley-Blackwell.
  • Herman, E. S., & Chomsky, N. (2011). Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
  • Jenkins, R. (2000). Disenchantment, Enchantment and Re-Enchantment: Max Weber at the Millennium. Max Weber Studies, 1(1), 11–32.
  • Joseph, S. (2012). Social Media, Political Change, and Human Rights. Boston College International and Comparative Law Review, 35, 145.
  • Kant, I. (1992). An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment? (T. Humphrey, Trans.). Hackett Publishing.
  • Kaya, T. (2020). The changes in the effects of social media use of Cypriots due to COVID-19 pandemic. Technology in Society, 63, 101380. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techsoc.2020.101380
  • Keeley, B. L. (1999). Of Conspiracy Theories. The Journal of Philosophy, 96(3), 109–126. JSTOR. https://doi.org/10.2307/2564659
  • Keyes, R. (2004). The Post-truth Era: Dishonesty And Deception In Contemporary Life. St. Martin’s Press.
  • Kumar, S., & Shah, N. (2018). False Information on Web and Social Media: A Survey. ArXiv:1804.08559 [Cs]. http://arxiv.org/abs/1804.08559 Oliver, J. E., & Wood, T. (2014). Medical Conspiracy Theories and Health Behaviors in the United States. JAMA Internal Medicine, 174(5), 817–818. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamainternmed.2014.190
  • Petrican, R., & Burris, C. T. (2012). Am I the stone? Overattribution of agency and religious orientation. Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, 4(4), 312–323. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0027942
  • Rochlin, N. (2017). Fake news: Belief in post-truth. Library Hi Tech, 35(3), 386–392. https://doi.org/10.1108/LHT-03-2017-0062
  • Rose, J. (2017). Brexit, Trump, and Post-Truth Politics. Public Integrity, 19(6), 555–558. https://doi.org/10.1080/10999922.2017.1285540
  • Rosset, E. (2008). It’s no accident: Our bias for intentional explanations. Cognition, 108(3), 771–780. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2008.07.001
  • Rubinstein, W. D., & von Maravic, P. (2010). Max Weber, Bureaucracy, and Corruption. In G. de Graaf, P. von Maravić, & P. Wagenaar (Eds.), The Good Cause (1st ed., pp. 21–35). Verlag Barbara Budrich; JSTOR. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvbj7k5p.6
  • Shahsavari, S., Holur, P., Wang, T., Tangherlini, T. R., & Roychowdhury, V. (2020). Conspiracy in the time of corona: Automatic detection of emerging COVID-19 conspiracy theories in social media and the news. Journal of Computational Social Science. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42001-020-00086-5
  • Social media use by education. (2017, January 11). Pew Research Center: Internet, Science & Tech. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/chart/social-media-use-by-education/
  • Spinoza, B. de. (2018). Spinoza: Ethics: Proved in Geometrical Order (M. Kisner, Ed.). Cambridge University Press.
  • Swami, V., Voracek, M., Stieger, S., Tran, U. S., & Furnham, A. (2014). Analytic thinking reduces belief in conspiracy theories. Cognition, 133(3), 572–585. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2014.08.006
  • van Prooijen, J.-W. (2017). Why Education Predicts Decreased Belief in Conspiracy Theories. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 31(1), 50–58. https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.3301
  • van Prooijen, J.-W., & van Vugt, M. (2018). Conspiracy Theories: Evolved Functions and Psychological Mechanisms. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 13(6), 770–788. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691618774270
  • van Prooijen, J.-W. van, & Lange, P. A. M. van. (2014). Power, Politics, and Paranoia: Why People are Suspicious of Their Leaders. Cambridge University Press.
  • West, H. G., & Sanders, T. (Eds.). (2003). Transparency and Conspiracy: Ethnographies of Suspicion in the New World Order. Duke University Press.
  • Wood, E. M. (1997). Modernity, postmodernity or capitalism? Review of International Political Economy, 4(3), 539–560. https://doi.org/10.1080/096922997347742

COVID-19 CONSPIRACISM IN THE AGE OF POST-TRUTH

Year 2022, Issue: 76, 227 - 244, 13.12.2022

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic has triggered one of the most important structural crises of the world as the pandemic has not just had a great impact on the healthcare systems, but it has overwhelmed the world economically, politically and socially due to the extreme measures applied to mitigate the propagation of the virus. This situation has led to numerous debates around the effects of the pandemic and the methods that states applied to deal with it, not only in academic circles but in all levels of society merely throughout social media discussions to which participation does not require any educational or professional background. Consequently, this period has also witnessed the diffusion of conspiracy theories varying from accusations which consider the rapid propagation of the virus as a plot of states and big pharmaceutical companies to allegations which presume the pandemic as a hoax to implement new communication technologies like 5G. It is obvious that this situation misleads people and endangers the struggle against the propagation of the virus. At first glance, it can be thought that the use of new communication technologies is to blame for the diffusion of false news, and a solution can be found in developing new tools to detect hoaxes beforehand. However, although social media facilitates the diffusion of conspiracism, it cannot be taken as the major reason seeing the fact that people have chosen to use social media platforms as their information sources because of their distrust against the mainstream media insomuch as information itself has been commodified in the age of information. Thus, this article aims to investigate within a philosophical perspective the sociopsychological mechanisms of the propensity towards conspiracy theories in the post-truth era in relation with the lost faith in the Enlightenment project’s quest for universal truths due to the commodification and exploitation of information.

References

  • Abalakina‐Paap, M., Stephan, W. G., Craig, T., & Gregory, W. L. (1999). Beliefs in Conspiracies. Political Psychology, 20(3), 637–647. https://doi.org/10.1111/0162-895X.00160
  • Adair, S. (2010). The Commodification of Information and Social Inequality. Critical Sociology, 36(2), 243–263. https://doi.org/10.1177/0896920509357505
  • Adorno, T., & Horkheimer, M. (2002). Dialectic of Enlightenment. Stanford University Press.
  • Ahmed, W., Vidal-Alaball, J., Downing, J., & Seguí, F. L. (2020). COVID-19 and the 5G Conspiracy Theory: Social Network Analysis of Twitter Data. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 22(5), e19458. https://doi.org/10.2196/19458
  • Allcott, H., & Gentzkow, M. (2017). Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 31(2), 211–236. https://doi.org/10.1257/jep.31.2.211
  • Allington, D., Duffy, B., Wessely, S., Dhavan, N., & Rubin, J. (2020). Health-protective behaviour, social media usage and conspiracy belief during the COVID-19 public health emergency. Psychological Medicine, 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1017/S003329172000224X
  • Aps, P. (2019, August 22). COLUMN-Conspiracy theories risk becoming new currency of post-truth politics: Peter Apps. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/article/apps-conspiracy-idUSL5N25I3XI
  • Arendt, H. (1972). Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics, Civil Disobedience on Violence, Thoughts on Politics, and Revolution. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
  • Atran, S., & Norenzayan, A. (2004). Religion’s evolutionary landscape: Counterintuition, commitment, compassion, communion. The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 27(6), 713–730; discussion 730-770. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0140525x04000172
  • Bacon, F. (1905). Novum Organum. George Routledge & Sons.
  • Baldwin, D. A., & Baird, J. A. (2001). Discerning intentions in dynamic human action. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 5(4), 171–178. https://doi.org/10.1016/s1364-6613(00)01615-6
  • Bale, J. M. (2007). Political paranoia v. political realism: On distinguishing between bogus conspiracy theories and genuine conspiratorial politics. Patterns of Prejudice, 41(1), 45–60. https://doi.org/10.1080/00313220601118751
  • Bègue, L., Bushman, B. J., Giancola, P. R., Subra, B., & Rosset, E. (2010). “There is no such thing as an accident,” especially when people are drunk. Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin, 36(10), 1301–1304. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167210383044
  • Brotherton, R. (2017). Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories (Reprint edition). Bloomsbury Sigma.
  • Brotherton, R., & French, C. C. (2015). Intention Seekers: Conspiracist Ideation and Biased Attributions of Intentionality. PLoS ONE, 10(5). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0124125
  • Chomsky, N. (2011). Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda. Seven Stories Press.
  • De Dijn, H. (2013). Spinoza On Truth, Religion, and Salvation. The Review of Metaphysics, 66(3), 545–564. JSTOR.
  • Douglas, K. M., Sutton, R. M., Callan, M. J., Dawtry, R. J., & Harvey, A. J. (2016). Someone is pulling the strings: Hypersensitive agency detection and belief in conspiracy theories. Thinking & Reasoning, 22(1), 57–77. https://doi.org/10.1080/13546783.2015.1051586
  • Dwivedi, Y. K., Hughes, D. L., Coombs, C., Constantiou, I., Duan, Y., Edwards, J. S., Gupta, B., Lal, B., Misra, S., Prashant, P., Raman, R., Rana, N. P., Sharma, S. K., & Upadhyay, N. (2020). Impact of COVID-19 pandemic on information management research and practice: Transforming education, work and life. International Journal of Information Management, 55, 102211. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2020.102211
  • Grimes, D. R. (2020). Health disinformation & social media. EMBO Reports, 21(11), e51819. https://doi.org/10.15252/embr.202051819
  • Harvey, D. (1991). The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Wiley-Blackwell.
  • Herman, E. S., & Chomsky, N. (2011). Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
  • Jenkins, R. (2000). Disenchantment, Enchantment and Re-Enchantment: Max Weber at the Millennium. Max Weber Studies, 1(1), 11–32.
  • Joseph, S. (2012). Social Media, Political Change, and Human Rights. Boston College International and Comparative Law Review, 35, 145.
  • Kant, I. (1992). An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment? (T. Humphrey, Trans.). Hackett Publishing.
  • Kaya, T. (2020). The changes in the effects of social media use of Cypriots due to COVID-19 pandemic. Technology in Society, 63, 101380. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techsoc.2020.101380
  • Keeley, B. L. (1999). Of Conspiracy Theories. The Journal of Philosophy, 96(3), 109–126. JSTOR. https://doi.org/10.2307/2564659
  • Keyes, R. (2004). The Post-truth Era: Dishonesty And Deception In Contemporary Life. St. Martin’s Press.
  • Kumar, S., & Shah, N. (2018). False Information on Web and Social Media: A Survey. ArXiv:1804.08559 [Cs]. http://arxiv.org/abs/1804.08559 Oliver, J. E., & Wood, T. (2014). Medical Conspiracy Theories and Health Behaviors in the United States. JAMA Internal Medicine, 174(5), 817–818. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamainternmed.2014.190
  • Petrican, R., & Burris, C. T. (2012). Am I the stone? Overattribution of agency and religious orientation. Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, 4(4), 312–323. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0027942
  • Rochlin, N. (2017). Fake news: Belief in post-truth. Library Hi Tech, 35(3), 386–392. https://doi.org/10.1108/LHT-03-2017-0062
  • Rose, J. (2017). Brexit, Trump, and Post-Truth Politics. Public Integrity, 19(6), 555–558. https://doi.org/10.1080/10999922.2017.1285540
  • Rosset, E. (2008). It’s no accident: Our bias for intentional explanations. Cognition, 108(3), 771–780. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2008.07.001
  • Rubinstein, W. D., & von Maravic, P. (2010). Max Weber, Bureaucracy, and Corruption. In G. de Graaf, P. von Maravić, & P. Wagenaar (Eds.), The Good Cause (1st ed., pp. 21–35). Verlag Barbara Budrich; JSTOR. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvbj7k5p.6
  • Shahsavari, S., Holur, P., Wang, T., Tangherlini, T. R., & Roychowdhury, V. (2020). Conspiracy in the time of corona: Automatic detection of emerging COVID-19 conspiracy theories in social media and the news. Journal of Computational Social Science. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42001-020-00086-5
  • Social media use by education. (2017, January 11). Pew Research Center: Internet, Science & Tech. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/chart/social-media-use-by-education/
  • Spinoza, B. de. (2018). Spinoza: Ethics: Proved in Geometrical Order (M. Kisner, Ed.). Cambridge University Press.
  • Swami, V., Voracek, M., Stieger, S., Tran, U. S., & Furnham, A. (2014). Analytic thinking reduces belief in conspiracy theories. Cognition, 133(3), 572–585. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2014.08.006
  • van Prooijen, J.-W. (2017). Why Education Predicts Decreased Belief in Conspiracy Theories. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 31(1), 50–58. https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.3301
  • van Prooijen, J.-W., & van Vugt, M. (2018). Conspiracy Theories: Evolved Functions and Psychological Mechanisms. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 13(6), 770–788. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691618774270
  • van Prooijen, J.-W. van, & Lange, P. A. M. van. (2014). Power, Politics, and Paranoia: Why People are Suspicious of Their Leaders. Cambridge University Press.
  • West, H. G., & Sanders, T. (Eds.). (2003). Transparency and Conspiracy: Ethnographies of Suspicion in the New World Order. Duke University Press.
  • Wood, E. M. (1997). Modernity, postmodernity or capitalism? Review of International Political Economy, 4(3), 539–560. https://doi.org/10.1080/096922997347742
There are 43 citations in total.

Details

Primary Language English
Subjects Philosophy
Journal Section Research Articles
Authors

Ömer Ersin Kahraman 0000-0002-3744-5965

Publication Date December 13, 2022
Submission Date April 22, 2022
Published in Issue Year 2022 Issue: 76

Cite

APA Kahraman, Ö. E. (2022). COVID-19 CONSPIRACISM IN THE AGE OF POST-TRUTH. Felsefe Dünyası, 2(76), 227-244.