As anyone who has googled their symptoms and convinced themselves that they’ve got a brain tumor will attest, the internet makes it very easy to self-(mis)diagnose your health problems. And although social media and other digital forums can be a lifeline for some people looking for a diagnosis or community, when that information is wrong, it can put their well-being and even lives in danger. Unfortunately, this modern impulse to “do your own research” became even more pronounced during the coronavirus pandemic. This story is part of MIT Technology Review’s series “The New Conspiracy Age,” on how the present boom in conspiracy theories is reshaping science and technology. We asked a number of health-care professionals about how this shifting landscape is changing their profession. They told us that they are being forced to adapt how they treat patients. It’s a wide range of experiences: Some say patients tell them they just want more information about certain treatments because they’re concerned about how effective they are. Others hear that their patients just don’t trust the powers that be. Still others say patients are rejecting evidence-based medicine altogether in favor of alternative theories they’ve come across online.  These are their stories, in their own words. Interviews have been edited for length and clarity. The physician trying to set shared goals  David Scales Internal medicine hospitalist and assistant professor of medicine, Weill Cornell Medical CollegeNew York City Every one of my colleagues has stories about patients who have been rejective of care, or had very peculiar perspectives on what their care should be. Sometimes that’s driven by religion. But I think what has changed is people, not necessarily with a religious standpoint, having very fixed beliefs that are sometimes—based on all the evidence that we have—in contradiction with their health goals. And that is a very challenging situation. 
I once treated a patient with a connective tissue disease called Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. While there’s no doubt that the illness exists, there’s a lot of doubt and uncertainty over which symptoms can be attributed to Ehlers-Danlos. This means it can fall into what social scientists call a “contested illness.”  Contested illnesses used to be causes for arguably fringe movements, but they have become much more prominent since the rise of social media in the mid-2010s. Patients often search for information that resonates with their experience. 
This patient was very hesitant about various treatments, and it was clear she was getting her information from, I would say, suspect sources. She’d been following people online who were not necessarily trustworthy, so I sat down with her and we looked them up on Quackwatch, a site that lists health myths and misconduct.  “She was extremely knowledgeable, and had done a lot of her own research, but she struggled to tell the difference between good and bad sources.” She was still accepting of treatment, and was extremely knowledgeable, and had done a lot of her own research, but she struggled to tell the difference between good and bad sources and fixed beliefs that overemphasize particular things—like what symptoms might be attributable to other stuff. Physicians have the tools to work with patients who are struggling with these challenges. The first is motivational interviewing, a counseling technique that was developed for people with substance-use disorders. It’s a nonjudgmental approach that uses open-ended questions to draw out people’s motivations, and to find where there’s a mismatch between their behaviors and their beliefs. It’s highly effective in treating people who are vaccine-hesitant. Another is an approach called shared decision-making. First we work out what the patient’s goals are and then figure out a way to align those with what we know about the evidence-based way to treat them. It’s something we use for end-of-life care, too. What’s concerning to me is that it seems as though there’s a dynamic of patients coming in with a fixed belief of how to diagnose their illness, how their symptoms should be treated, and how to treat it in a way that’s completely divorced from the kinds of medicine you’d find in textbooks—and that the same dynamic is starting to extend to other illnesses, too. The therapist committed to being there when the conspiracy fever breaks  Damien Stewart PsychologistWarsaw, Poland Before covid, I hadn’t really had any clients bring up conspiracy theories into my practice. But once the pandemic began, they went from being fun or harmless to something dangerous.In my experience, vaccines were the topic where I first really started to see some militancy—people who were looking down the barrel of losing their jobs because they wouldn’t get vaccinated. At one point, I had an out-and-out conspiracy theorist say to me, “I might as well wear a yellow star like the Jews during the Holocaust, because I won’t get vaccinated.”  I felt pure anger, and I reached a point in my therapeutic journey I didn’t know would ever occur—I’d found that I had a line that could be crossed by a client that I could not tolerate. I spoke in a very direct manner he probably wasn’t used to and challenged his conspiracy theory. He got very angry and hung up the call.   It made me figure out how I was going to deal with this in future, and to develop an approach—which was to not challenge the conspiracy theory, but to gently talk through it, to provide alternative points of view and ask questions. I try to find the therapeutic value in the information, in the conversations we’re having. My belief is and evidence seems to show that people believe in conspiracy theories because there’s something wrong in their life that is inexplicable, and they need something to explain what’s happening to them. And even if I have no belief or agreement whatsoever in what they’re saying, I think I need to sit here and have this conversation, because one day this person might snap out of it, and I need to be here when that happens.

As a psychologist, you have to remember that these people who believe in these things are extremely vulnerable. So my anger around these conspiracy theories has changed from being directed toward the deliverer—the person sitting in front of me saying these things—to the people driving the theories. The emergency room doctor trying to get patients to reconnect with the evidence Luis Aguilar Montalvan Attending emergency medicine physician Queens, New York The emergency department is essentially the pulse of what is happening in society. That’s what really attracted me to it. And I think the job of the emergency doctor, particularly within shifting political views or belief in Western medicine, is to try to reconnect with someone. To just create the experience that you need to prime someone to hopefully reconsider their relationship with this evidence-based medicine. When I was working in the pediatrics emergency department a few years ago, we saw a resurgence of diseases we thought we had eradicated, like measles. I typically framed it by saying to the child’s caregiver: “This is a disease we typically use vaccines for, and it can prevent it in the majority of people.”  “The doctor is now more like a consultant or a customer service provider than the authority. … The power dynamic has changed.” The sentiment among my adult patients who are reluctant to get vaccinated or take certain medications seems to be from a mistrust of the government or “The System” rather than from anything Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says directly, for example. I’m definitely seeing more patients these days asking me what they can take to manage a condition or pain that’s not medication. I tell them that the knowledge I have is based on science, and explain the medications I’d typically give other people in their situation. I try to give them autonomy while reintroducing the idea of sticking with the evidence, and for the most part they’re appreciative and courteous. The role of doctor has changed in recent years—there’s been a cultural change. My understanding is that back in the day, what the doctor said, the patient did. Some doctors used to shame parents who hadn’t vaccinated their kids. Now we’re shifting away from that, and the doctor is now more like a consultant or a customer service provider than the authority. I think that could be because we’ve seen a lot of bad actors in medicine, so the power dynamic has changed.   I think if we had a more unified approach at a national level, if they had an actual unified and transparent relationship with the population, that would set us up right. But I’m not sure we’ve ever had it. STEPHANIE ARNETT/MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | PUBLIC DOMAIN The psychologist who supported severely mentally ill patients through the pandemic  Michelle Sallee Psychologist, board certified in serious mental illness psychologyOakland, California I’m a clinical psychologist who only works with people who have been in the hospital three or more times in the last 12 months. I do both individual therapy and a lot of group work, and several years ago during the pandemic, I wrote a 10-week program for patients about how to cope with sheltering in place, following safety guidelines, and their concerns about vaccines. My groups were very structured around evidence-based practice, and I had rules for the groups. First, I would tell people that the goal was not to talk them out of their conspiracy theory; my goal was not to talk them into a vaccination. My goal was to provide a safe place for them to be able to talk about things that were terrifying to them. We wanted to reduce anxiety, depression, thoughts of suicide, and the need for psychiatric hospitalizations. 
Half of the group was pro–public health requirements, and their paranoia and fear for safety was around people who don’t get vaccinated; the other half might have been strongly opposed to anyone other than themselves deciding they need a vaccination or a mask. Both sides were fearing for their lives—but from each other. I wanted to make sure everybody felt heard, and it was really important to be able to talk about what they believed—like, some people felt like the government was trying to track us and even kill us—without any judgment from other people. My theory is that if you allow people to talk freely about what’s on their mind without blocking them with your own opinions or judgment, they will find their way eventually. And a lot of times that works. 
People have been stuck on their conspiracy theory or their paranoia has been stuck on it for a long time because they’re always fighting with people about it, everyone’s telling them that this is not true. So we would just have an open discussion about these things.  “People have been stuck on their conspiracy theory for a long time because they’re always fighting with people about it, everyone’s telling them that this is not true.” I ran the program four times for a total of 27 people, and the thing that I remember the most was how respectful and tolerant and empathic, but still honest about their feelings and opinions, everybody was. At the end of the program, most participants reported a decrease in pandemic-related stress. Half reported a decrease in general perceived stress, and half reported no change. I’d say that the rate of how much vaccines are talked about now is significantly lower, and covid doesn’t really come up anymore. But other medical illnesses come up—patients saying, “My doctor said I need to get this surgery, but I know who they’re working for.” Everybody has their concerns, but when a person with psychosis has concerns, it becomes delusional, paranoid, and psychotic. I’d like to see more providers be given more training around severe mental illness. These are not just people who just need to go to the hospital to get remedicated for a couple of days. There’s a whole life that needs to get looked at here, and they deserve that. I’d like to see more group settings with a combination of psychoeducation, evidence-based research, skills training, and process, because the research says that’s the combination that’s really important. Editor’s note: Sallee works for a large HMO psychiatry department, and her account here is not on behalf of, endorsed by, or speaking for any larger organization. The epidemiologist rethinking how to bridge differences in culture and community  John Wright Clinician and epidemiologistBradford, United Kingdom I work in Bradford, the fifth-biggest city in the UK. It has a big South Asian population and high levels of deprivation. Before covid, I’d say there was growing awareness about conspiracies. But during the pandemic, I think that lockdown, isolation, fear of this unknown virus, and then the uncertainty about the future came together in a perfect storm to highlight people’s latent attraction to alternative hypotheses and conspiracies—it was fertile ground. I’ve been a National Health Service doctor for almost 40 years, and until recently, the NHS had a great reputation, with great trust, and great public support. The pandemic was the first time that I started seeing that erode.
It wasn’t just conspiracies about vaccines or new drugs, either—it was also an undermining of trust in public institutions. I remember an older woman who had come into the emergency department with covid. She was very unwell, but she just wouldn’t go into hospital despite all our efforts, because there were conspiracies going around that we were killing patients in hospital. So she went home, and I don’t know what happened to her. The other big change in recent years has been social media and social networks that have obviously amplified and accelerated alternative theories and conspiracies. That’s been the tinder that’s allowed the wildfires to spread with these sort of conspiracy theories. In Bradford, particularly among ethnic minority communities, there’s been stronger links between them—allowing this to spread quicker—but also a more structural distrust.  Vaccination rates have fallen since the pandemic, and we’re seeing lower uptake of the meningitis and HPV vaccines in schools among South Asian families. Ultimately, this needs a bigger societal approach than individual clinicians putting needles in arms. We started a project called Born in Bradford in 2007 that’s following more than 13,000 families, including around 20,000 teenagers as they grow up. One of the biggest focuses for us is how they use social media and how it links to their mental health, so we’re asking them to donate their digital media to us so we can examine it in confidence. We’re hoping it could allow us to explore conspiracies and influences. The challenge for the next generation of resident doctors and clinicians is: How do we encourage health literacy in young people about what’s right and what’s wrong without being paternalistic? We also need to get better at engaging with people as health advocates to counter some of the online narratives. The NHS website can’t compete with how engaging content on TikTok is.
The pediatrician who worries about the confusing public narrative on vaccines Jessica Weisz PediatricianWashington, DC I’m an outpatient pediatrician, so I do a lot of preventative care, checkups, and sick visits, and treating coughs and colds—those sorts of things. I’ve had specific training in how to support families in clinical decision-making related to vaccines, and every family wants what’s best for their child, and so supporting them is part of my job. I don’t see specific articulation of conspiracy theories, but I do think there’s more questions about vaccines in conversations I’ve not typically had to have before. I’ve found that parents and caregivers do ask general questions about the risks and benefits of vaccines. We just try to reiterate that vaccines have been studied, that they are intentionally scheduled to protect an immature immune system when it’s the most vulnerable, and that we want everyone to be safe, healthy, and strong. That’s how we can provide protection. “I think what’s confusing is that distress is being sowed in headlines when most patients, families, and caregivers are motivated and want to be vaccinated.” I feel that the narrative in the public space is unfairly confusing to families when over 90% of families still want their kids to be vaccinated. The families who are not as interested in that, or have questions—it typically takes multiple conversations to support that family in their decision-making. It’s very rarely one conversation. I think what’s confusing is that distress is being sowed in headlines when most patients, families, and caregivers are motivated and want to be vaccinated. For example, some of the headlines around recent changes the CDC are making make it sound like they’re making a huge clinical change, when it’s actually not a huge change from what people are typically doing. In my standard clinical practice, we don’t give the combined MMRV vaccine to children under four years old, and that’s been standard practice in all of the places I’ve worked on the Eastern Seaboard. [Editor’s note: In early October, the CDC updated its recommendation that young children receive the varicella vaccine separately from the combined vaccine for measles, mumps, and rubella. Many practitioners, including Weisz, already offer the shots separately.] If you look at public surveys, pediatricians are still the most trusted [among health-care providers], and I do live in a jurisdiction with pretty strong policy about school-based vaccination. I think that people are getting information from multiple sources, but at the end of the day, in terms of both the national rates and also what I see in clinical practice, we really are seeing most families wanting vaccines.

According to internet listicles, the animated sitcom The Simpsons has predicted the future anywhere from 17 to 55 times.  “As you know, we’ve inherited quite a budget crunch from President Trump,” the newly sworn-in President Lisa Simpson declared way back in 2000, 17 years before the real estate mogul was inaugurated as the 45th leader of the United States. Earlier, in 1993, an episode of the show featured the “Osaka flu,” which some felt was eerily prescient of the coronavirus pandemic. And—somehow!—Simpsons writers just knew that the US Olympic curling team would beat Sweden eight whole years before they did it. After Team USA wins, Principal Skinner’s mother gloats to the Swedish curling team, “Tell me how my ice tastes.”THE SIMPSONS ™ & © 20TH TELEVISION The 16th-century seer Nostradamus made 942 predictions. To date, there have been some 800 episodes of The Simpsons. How does it feel to be a showrunner turned soothsayer? What’s it like when the world combs your jokes for prophecies and thinks you knew about 9/11 four years before it happened?  This story is part of MIT Technology Review’s series “The New Conspiracy Age,” on how the present boom in conspiracy theories is reshaping science and technology. Al Jean has worked on The Simpsons on and off since 1989; he is the cartoon’s longest-serving showrunner. Here, he reflects on the conspiracy theories that have sprung from these apparent prophecies. 
When did you first start hearing rumblings about The Simpsons having predicted the future? It definitely got huge when Donald Trump was elected president in 2016 after we “predicted” it in an episode from 2000. The original pitch for the line was Johnny Depp and that was in for a while, but it was decided that it wasn’t as funny as Trump. 
What people don’t remember is that in the year 2000, it wasn’t such a crazy name to pick, because Trump was talking about running as a Reform Party candidate. So, like a lot of our “predictions,” it’s an educated guess. I won’t comment on whether it’s a good thing that it happened, but I will say that it’s not the most illogical person you could have picked for that joke. And we did say that following him was Lisa, and now that he’s been elected again, we could still have Lisa next time—that’s my hope!  How did it make you feel that people thought you were a prophet?  Again, apart from the election’s impact on the free world, I would say that we were amused that we had said something that came true. Then we made a short video called “Trumptastic Voyage” in 2015 that predicted he would run in 2016, 2020, 2024, and 2028, so we’re three-quarters of the way through that arduous prediction.

[embedded content]

But I like people thinking that I know something about the future. It’s a good reputation to have. You only need half a dozen things that were either on target or even uncanny to be considered an oracle. Or maybe we’re from the future—I’ll let you decide!  Why do you think people are so drawn to the idea that The Simpsons is prophetic?  Maybe it slightly satisfies a yearning people have for meaning, certainly when life is now so random. Would you say that most of your predictions have logical explanations?  It’s cherry-picking—there are 35 years of material. How many of the things that we said came true versus how many of the many things we said did not come true? 

In 2014, we predicted Germany would win the World Cup in Brazil. It’s because we wanted a joke where the Brazilians were sad and they were singing a sad version of the “Olé, olé” song. So we had to think about who would be likely to win if Brazil lost, and Germany was the number two, so they did win, but it wasn’t the craziest prediction. In the same episode, we predicted that FIFA would be corrupt, which is a very easy prediction! So a lot of them fall under that category.  In one scene I wrote, Marge holds a book called Curious George and the Ebola Virus—people go, “Oh my God! He predicted that!” Well, Ebola existed when I wrote the joke. I’d seen a movie about it called Outbreak. It’s like predicting the Black Death.  But have any of your so-called “predictions” made even you pause?  There are a couple of really bizarre coincidences. There was a brochure in a New York episode [which aired in 1997] that said “New York, $9” next to a picture of the trade towers looking like an 11. That was nuts. It still sends chills down me. The writer of that episode, Ian Maxtone-Graham, was nonplussed. He really couldn’t believe it.  THE SIMPSONS ™ & © 20TH TELEVISION It’s not like we would’ve made that knowing what was going to come, which we didn’t. And people have advanced conspiracy theories that we’re all Ivy League writers who knew … it’s preposterous stuff that people say. There’s also a thing people do that we don’t really love, which is they fake predictions. So after something happens, they’ll concoct a Simpsons frame, and it’s not something that ever aired. [Editor’s note: People faked Simpsons screenshots seeming to predict the 2024 Baltimore bridge collapse and the 2019 Notre-Dame fire. Images from the real “Osaka flu” episode were also edited to include the word “coronavirus.”]  How does that make you feel? Is it frustrating? It shows you how you can really convince people of something that’s not the case. Our small denial doesn’t get as much attention.  As far as internet conspiracies go, where would you rate the idea that The Simpsons can predict the future? 
I hope it’s harmless. I think it’s really lodged in the internet very well. I don’t think it’s disappearing anytime soon. I’m sure for the rest of my life I’ll be hearing about what a group of psychics and seers I was part of. If we really could predict that well, we’d all be retired from betting on football. Although, advice to readers: Don’t bet on football.  THE SIMPSONS ™ & © 20TH TELEVISION Still, it is a tiny part of a trend that is alarming, which is people being unable to distinguish fact from fiction. And I have that trouble too. You read something, and your natural inclination has always been, “Well, I read it—it’s true.” And you have to really be skeptical about that. 
Can I ask you to predict a solution to all of this? I think my only solution is: Look at your phone less and read more books. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.  Amelia Tait is a London-based freelance features journalist who writes about culture, trends, and unusual phenomena. 

It’s become a truism that facts alone don’t change people’s minds. Perhaps nowhere is this more clear than when it comes to conspiracy theories: Many people believe that you can’t talk conspiracists out of their beliefs.  But that’s not necessarily true. It turns out that many conspiracy believers do respond to evidence and arguments—information that is now easy to deliver in the form of a tailored conversation with an AI chatbot. In research we published in the journal Science this year, we had over 2,000 conspiracy believers engage in a roughly eight-minute conversation with DebunkBot, a model we built on top of OpenAI’s GPT-4 Turbo (the most up-to-date GPT model at that time). Participants began by writing out, in their own words, a conspiracy theory that they believed and the evidence that made the theory compelling to them. Then we instructed the AI model to persuade the user to stop believing in that conspiracy and adopt a less conspiratorial view of the world. A three-round back-and-forth text chat with the AI model (lasting 8.4 minutes on average) led to a 20% decrease in participants’ confidence in the belief, and about one in four participants—all of whom believed the conspiracy theory beforehand—indicated that they did not believe it after the conversation. This effect held true for both classic conspiracies (think the JFK assassination or the moon landing hoax) and more contemporary politically charged ones (like those related to the 2020 election and covid-19). This story is part of MIT Technology Review’s series “The New Conspiracy Age,” on how the present boom in conspiracy theories is reshaping science and technology. This is good news, given the outsize role that unfounded conspiracy theories play in today’s political landscape. So while there are widespread and legitimate concerns that generative AI is a potent tool for spreading disinformation, our work shows that it can also be part of the solution.  Even people who began the conversation absolutely certain that their conspiracy was true, or who indicated that it was highly important to their personal worldview, showed marked decreases in belief. Remarkably, the effects were very durable; we followed up with participants two months later and saw just as big a reduction in conspiracy belief as we did immediately after the conversations.  Our experiments indicate that many believers are relatively rational but misinformed, and getting them timely, accurate facts can have a big impact. Conspiracy theories can make sense to reasonable people who have simply never heard clear, non-conspiratorial explanations for the events they’re fixated on. This may seem surprising. But many conspiratorial claims, while wrong, seem reasonable on the surface and require specialized, esoteric knowledge to evaluate and debunk. 
For example, 9/11 deniers often point to the claim that jet fuel doesn’t burn hot enough to melt steel as evidence that airplanes were not responsible for bringing down the Twin Towers—but the chatbot responds by pointing out that although this is true, the American Institute of Steel Construction says jet fuel does burn hot enough to reduce the strength of steel by over 50%, which is more than enough to cause such towers to collapse.  Although we have greater access to factual information than ever before, it is extremely difficult to search that vast corpus of knowledge efficiently. Finding the truth that way requires knowing what to google—or who to listen to—and being sufficiently motivated to seek out conflicting information. There are large time and skill barriers to conducting such a search every time we hear a new claim, and so it’s easy to take conspiratorial content you stumble upon at face value. And most would-be debunkers at the Thanksgiving table make elementary mistakes that AI avoids: Do you know the melting point and tensile strength of steel offhand? And when your relative calls you an idiot while trying to correct you, are you able to maintain your composure? 
With enough effort, humans would almost certainly be able to research and deliver facts like the AI in our experiments. And in a follow-up experiment, we found that the AI debunking was just as effective if we told participants they were talking to an expert rather than an AI. So it’s not that the debunking effect is AI-specific. Generally speaking, facts and evidence delivered by humans would also work. But it would require a lot of time and concentration for a human to come up with those facts. Generative AI can do the cognitive labor of fact-checking and rebutting conspiracy claims much more efficiently.  In another large follow-up experiment, we found that what drove the debunking effect was specifically the facts and evidence the model provided: Factors like letting people know the chatbot was going to try to talk them out of their beliefs didn’t reduce its efficacy, whereas telling the model to try to persuade its chat partner without using facts and evidence totally eliminated the effect.  Although the foibles and hallucinations of these models are well documented, our results suggest that debunking efforts are widespread enough on the internet to keep the conspiracy-focused conversations roughly accurate. When we hired a professional fact-checker to evaluate GPT-4’s claims, they found that over 99% of the claims were rated as true (and not politically biased). Also, in the few cases where participants named conspiracies that turned out to be true (like MK Ultra, the CIA’s human experimentation program from the 1950s), the AI chatbot confirmed their accurate belief rather than erroneously talking them out of it. To date, largely by necessity, interventions to combat conspiracy theorizing have been mainly prophylactic—aiming to prevent people from going down the rabbit hole rather than trying to pull them back out. Now, thanks to advances in generative AI, we have a tool that can change conspiracists’ minds using evidence.  Bots prompted to debunk conspiracy theories could be deployed on social media platforms to engage with those who share conspiratorial content—including other AI chatbots that spread conspiracies. Google could also link debunking AI models to search engines to provide factual answers to conspiracy-related queries. And instead of arguing with your conspiratorial uncle over the dinner table, you could just pass him your phone and have him talk to AI.  Of course, there are much deeper implications here for how we as humans make sense of the world around us. It is widely argued that we now live in a “post-truth” world, where polarization and politics have eclipsed facts and evidence. By that account, our passions trump truth, logic-based reasoning is passé, and the only way to effectively change people’s minds is via psychological tactics like presenting compelling personal narratives or changing perceptions of the social norm. If so, the typical, discourse-based work of living together in a democracy is fruitless.
But facts aren’t dead. Our findings about conspiracy theories are the latest—and perhaps most extreme—in an emerging body of research demonstrating the persuasive power of facts and evidence. For example, while it was once believed that correcting falsehoods that aligns with one’s politics would just cause people to dig in and believe them even more, this idea of a “backfire” has itself been debunked: Many studies consistently find that corrections and warning labels reduce belief in, and sharing of, falsehoods—even among those who most distrust the fact-checkers making the corrections. Similarly, evidence-based arguments can change partisans’ minds on political issues, even when they are actively reminded that the argument goes against their party leader’s position. And simply reminding people to think about whether content is accurate before they share it can substantially reduce the spread of misinformation.  And if facts aren’t dead, then there’s hope for democracy—though this arguably requires a consensus set of facts from which rival factions can work. There is indeed widespread partisan disagreement on basic facts, and a disturbing level of belief in conspiracy theories. Yet this doesn’t necessarily mean our minds are inescapably warped by our politics and identities. When faced with evidence—even inconvenient or uncomfortable evidence—many people do shift their thinking in response. And so if it’s possible to disseminate accurate information widely enough, perhaps with the help of AI, we may be able to reestablish the factual common ground that is missing from society today. You can try our debunking bot yourself at at debunkbot.com.  Thomas Costello is an assistant professor in social and decision sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. His research integrates psychology, political science, and human-computer interaction to examine where our viewpoints come from, how they differ from person to person, and why they change—as well as the sweeping impacts of artificial intelligence on these processes. Gordon Pennycook is the Dorothy and Ariz Mehta Faculty Leadership Fellow and associate professor of psychology at Cornell University. He examines the causes and consequences of analytic reasoning, exploring how intuitive versus deliberative thinking shapes decision-making to understand errors underlying issues such as climate inaction, health behaviors, and political polarization. David Rand is a professor of information science, marketing and management communication, and psychology at Cornell University. He uses approaches from computational social science and cognitive science to explore how human-AI dialogue can correct inaccurate beliefs, why people share falsehoods, and how to reduce political polarization and promote cooperation.

It was October 2024, and Hurricane Helene had just devastated the US Southeast. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia found an abstract target on which to pin the blame: “Yes they can control the weather,” she posted on X. “It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.”  There was no word on who “they” were, but maybe it was better that way.  She was repeating what’s by now a pretty familiar and popular conspiracy theory: that shadowy forces are out there, wielding unknown technology to control the weather and wreak havoc on their supposed enemies. This claim, fundamentally preposterous from a scientific standpoint, has grown louder and more common in recent years. It pops up over and over when extreme weather strikes: in Dubai in April 2024, in Australia in July 2022, in the US after California floods and hurricanes like Helene and Milton. In the UK, conspiracy theorists claimed that the government had fixed the weather to be sunny and rain-free during the first covid lockdown in March 2020. Most recently, the theories spread again when disastrous floods hit central Texas this past July. The idea has even inspired some antigovernment extremists to threaten and try to destroy weather radar towers.  This story is part of MIT Technology Review’s series “The New Conspiracy Age,” on how the present boom in conspiracy theories is reshaping science and technology. But here’s the thing: While Greene and other believers are not correct, this conspiracy theory—like so many others—holds a kernel of much more modest truth behind the grandiose claims.  Sure, there is no current way for humans to control the weather. We can’t cause major floods or redirect hurricanes or other powerful storm systems, simply because the energy involved is far too great for humans to alter significantly.  But there are ways we can modify the weather. The key difference is the scale of what is possible. 
The most common weather modification practice is called cloud seeding, and it involves injecting small amounts of salts or other materials into clouds with the goal of juicing levels of rain or snow. This is typically done in dry areas that lack regular precipitation. Research shows that it can in fact work, though advances in technology reveal that its impact is modest—coaxing maybe 5% to 10% more moisture out of otherwise stubborn clouds. But the fact that humans can influence weather at all gives conspiracy theorists a foothold in the truth. Add to this a spotty history of actual efforts by governments and militaries to control major storms, as well as other emerging but not-yet-deployed-at-any-scale technologies that aim to address climate change … and you can see where things get confusing. 
So while more sweeping claims of weather control are ultimately ridiculous from a scientific standpoint, they can’t be dismissed as entirely stupid. This all helped make the conspiracy theories swirling after the recent Texas floods particularly loud and powerful. Just days earlier, 100 miles away from the epicenter of the floods, in a town called Runge, the cloud-seeding company Rainmaker had flown a single-engine plane and released about 70 grams of silver iodide into some clouds; a modest drizzle of less than half a centimeter of rain followed. But once the company saw a storm front in the forecast, it suspended its work; there was no need to seed with rain already on the way. “We conducted an operation on July 2, totally within the scope of what we were regulatorily permitted to do,” Augustus Doricko, Rainmaker’s founder and CEO, recently told me. Still, when as much as 20 inches of rain fell soon afterward not too far away, and more than 100 people died, the conspiracy theory machine whirred into action.  As Doricko told the Washington Post in the tragedy’s aftermath, he and his company faced “nonstop pandemonium” on social media; eventually someone even posted photos from outside Rainmaker’s office, along with its address. Doricko told me a few factors played into the pile-on, including a lack of familiarity with the specifics of cloud seeding, as well as what he called “deliberately inflammatory messaging from politicians.” Indeed, theories about Rainmaker and cloud seeding spread online via prominent figures including Greene and former national security advisor Mike Flynn.  Unfortunately, all this is happening at the same time as the warming climate is making heavy rainfall and the floods that accompany it more and more likely. “These events will become more frequent,” says Emily Yeh, a professor of geography at the University of Colorado who has examined approaches and reactions to weather modification around the world. “There is a large, vocal group of people who are willing to believe anything but climate change as the reason for Texas floods, or hurricanes.” Worsening extremes, increasing weather modification activity, improving technology, a sometimes shady track record—the conditions are perfect for an otherwise niche conspiracy theory to spread to anyone desperate for tidy explanations of increasingly disastrous events.
Here, we break down just what’s possible and what isn’t—and address some of the more colorful reasons why people may believe things that go far beyond the facts.  What we can do with the weather—and who is doing it The basic concepts behind cloud seeding have been around for about 80 years, and government interest in the topic goes back even longer than that.  The primary practice involves using planes, drones, or generators on the ground to inject tiny particles of stuff, usually silver iodide, into existing clouds. The particles act as nuclei around which moisture can build up, forming ice crystals that can get heavy enough to fall out of the cloud as snow or rain. “Weather modification is an old field; starting in the 1940s there was a lot of excitement,” says David Delene, a research professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of North Dakota and an expert on cloud seeding. In a US Senate report from 1952 to establish a committee to study weather modification, authors noted that a small amount of extra rain could “produce electric power worth hundreds of thousands of dollars” and “greatly increase crop yields.” It also cited potential uses like “reducing soil erosion,” “breaking up hurricanes,” and even “cutting holes in clouds so that aircraft can operate.”  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS But, as Delene adds, “that excitement … was not realized.” Through the 1980s, extensive research often funded or conducted by Washington yielded a much better understanding of atmospheric science and cloud physics, though it proved extremely difficult to actually demonstrate the efficacy of the technology itself. In other words, scientists learned the basic principles behind cloud seeding, and understood on a theoretical level that it should work—but it was hard to tell how big an impact it was having on rainfall. There is huge variability between one cloud and another, one storm system and another, one mountain or valley and another; for decades, the tools available to researchers did not really allow for firm conclusions on exactly how much extra moisture, if any, they were getting out of any given operation. Interest in the practice died down to a low hum by the 1990s. But over the past couple of decades, the early excitement has returned.
Cloud seeding can enhance levels of rain and snow  While the core technology has largely stayed the same, several projects launched in the US and abroad starting in the 2000s have combined statistical modeling with new and improved aircraft-based measurements, ground-based radar, and more to provide better answers on what results are actually achievable when seeding clouds. “I think we’ve identified unequivocally that we can indeed modify the cloud,” says Jeff French, an associate professor and head of the University of Wyoming’s Department of Atmospheric Science, who has worked for years on the topic. But even as scientists have come to largely agree that the practice can have an impact on precipitation, they also largely recognize that the impact probably has some fairly modest upper limits—far short of massive water surges.  “There is absolutely no evidence that cloud seeding can modify a cloud to the extent that would be needed to cause a flood,” French says. Floods require a few factors, he adds—a system with plenty of moisture available that stays localized to a certain spot for an extended period. “All of these things which cloud seeding has zero effect on,” he says.  The technology simply operates on a different level. “Cloud seeding really is looking at making an inefficient system a little bit more efficient,” French says. 
As Delene puts it: “Originally [researchers] thought, well, we could, you know, do 50%, 100% increases in precipitation,” but “I think if you do a good program you’re not going to get more than a 10% increase.”  Asked for his take on a theoretical limit, French was hesitant—“I don’t know if I’m ready to stick my neck out”—but agreed on “maybe 10-ish percent” as a reasonable guess. Another cloud seeding expert, Katja Friedrich from the University of Colorado–Boulder, says that any grander potential would be obvious by this point: We wouldn’t have “spent the last 100 years debating—within the scientific community—if cloud seeding works,” she writes in an email. “It would have been easy to separate the signal (from cloud seeding) from the noise (natural precipitation).” It can also (probably) suppress precipitation Sometimes cloud seeding is used not to boost rain and snow but rather to try to reduce its severity—or, more specifically, to change the size of individual rain droplets or hailstones.  One of the most prominent examples has been in parts of Canada, where hailstorms can be devastating; a 2024 event in Calgary, for instance, was the country’s second-most-expensive disaster ever, with over $2 billion in damages.  Insurance companies in Alberta have been working together for nearly three decades on a cloud seeding program that’s aimed at reducing some of that damage. In these cases, the silver iodide or other particles are meant to act essentially as competition for other “embryos” inside the cloud, increasing the total number of hailstones and thus reducing each individual stone’s average size. 
Smaller hailstones means less damage when they reach the ground. The insurance companies—which continue to pay for the program—say losses have been cut by 50% since the program started, though scientists aren’t quite as confident in its overall success. A 2023 study published in Atmospheric Research examined 10 years of cloud seeding efforts in the province and found that the practice did appear to reduce potential for damage in about 60% of seeded storms—while in others, it had no effect or was even associated with increased hail (though the authors said this could have been due to natural variation). Similar techniques are also sometimes deployed to try to improve the daily forecast just a bit. During the 2008 Olympics, for instance, China engaged in a form of cloud seeding aimed at reducing rainfall. As MIT Technology Review detailed back then, officials with the Beijing Weather Modification Office planned to use a liquid-nitrogen-based coolant that could increase the number of water droplets in a cloud while reducing their size; this can get droplets to stay aloft a little longer instead of falling out of the cloud. Though it is tough to prove that it definitively would have rained without the effort, the targeted opening ceremony did stay dry.
So, where is this happening?  The United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization says that some form of weather modification is taking place in “more than 50 countries” and that “demand for these weather modification activities is increasing steadily due to the incidence of droughts and other calamities.” The biggest user of cloud-seeding tech is arguably China. Following the work around the Olympics, the country announced a huge expansion of its weather modification program in 2020, claiming it would eventually run operations for agricultural relief and other functions, including hail suppression, over an area about the size of India and Algeria combined. Since then, China has occasionally announced bits of progress—including updates to weather modification aircraft and the first use of drones for artificial snow enhancement. Overall, it spends billions on the practice, with more to come. Elsewhere, desert countries have taken an interest. In 2024, Saudi Arabia announced an expanded research program on cloud seeding—Delene, of the University of North Dakota, was part of a team that conducted experiments in various parts of that country in late 2023. Its neighbor the United Arab Emirates began “rain enhancement” activities back in 1990; this program too has faced outcry, especially after more than a typical year’s worth of rain fell in a single day in 2024, causing massive flooding. (Bloomberg recently published a story about persistent questions regarding the country’s cloud seeding program; in response to the story, French wrote in an email that the “best scientific understanding is still that cloud seeding CANNOT lead to these types of events.” Other experts we asked agreed.)  In the US, a 2024 Government Accountability Office report on cloud seeding said that at least nine states have active programs. These are sometimes run directly by the state and sometimes contracted out through nonprofits like the South Texas Weather Modification Association to private companies, including Doricko’s Rainmaker and North Dakota–based Weather Modification. In August, Doricko told me that Rainmaker had grown to 76 employees since it launched in 2023. It now runs cloud seeding operations in Utah, Idaho, Oregon, California, and Texas, as well as forecasting services in New Mexico and Arizona. And in an answer that may further fuel the conspiracy fire, he added they are also operating in one Middle Eastern country; when I asked which one, he’d only say, “Can’t tell you.” What we cannot do The versions of weather modification that the conspiracy theorists envision most often—significantly altering monsoons or hurricanes or making the skies clear and sunny for weeks at a time—have so far proved impossible to carry out. But that’s not necessarily for lack of trying. The US government attempted to alter a hurricane in 1947 as part of a program dubbed Project Cirrus. In collaboration with GE, government scientists seeded clouds with pellets of dry ice, the idea being that the falling pellets could induce supercooled liquid in the clouds to crystallize into ice. After they did this, the storm took a sharp left turn and struck the area around Savannah, Georgia. This was a significant moment for budding conspiracy theories, since a GE scientist who had been working with the government said he was “99% sure” the cyclone swerved because of their work. Other experts disagreed and showed that such storm trajectories are, in reality, perfectly possible without intervention. Perhaps unsurprisingly, public outrage and threats of lawsuits followed. It took some time for the hubbub to die down, after which several US government agencies continued—unsuccessfully—trying to alter and weaken hurricanes with a long-running cloud seeding program called Project Stormfury. Around the same time, the US military joined the fray with Operation Popeye, essentially trying to harness weather as a weapon in the Vietnam War—engaging in cloud seeding efforts over Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos in the late 1960s and early 1970s, with an eye toward increasing monsoon rains and bogging down the enemy. Though it was never really clear whether these efforts worked, the Nixon administration tried to deny them, going so far as to lie to the public and even to congressional committees. More recently and less menacingly, there have been experiments with Dyn-O-Gel—a Florida company’s super-absorbent powder, intended to be dropped into storm clouds to sop up their moisture. In the early 2000s, the company carried out experiments with the stuff in thunderstorms, and it had grand plans to use it to weaken tropical cyclones. But according to one former NOAA scientist, you would need to drop almost 38,000 tons of it, requiring nearly 380 individual plane trips, in and around even a relatively small cyclone’s eyewall to really affect the storm’s strength. And then you would have to do that again an hour and a half later, and so on. Reality tends to get in the way of the biggest weather modification ideas.
Beyond trying to control storms, there are some other potential weather modification technologies out there that are either just getting started or have never taken off. Swiss researchers have tried to use powerful lasers to induce cloud formation, for example; in Australia, where climate change is imperiling the Great Barrier Reef, artificial clouds created when ship-based nozzles spray moisture into the sky have been used to try to protect the vital ecosystem. In each case, the efforts remain small, localized, and not remotely close to achieving the kinds of control the conspiracy theorists allege. What is not weather modification—but gets lumped in with it Further worsening weather control conspiracies is that there is a tendency to conflate cloud seeding and other promising weather modification research with concepts such as chemtrails—a full-on conspiracist fever dream about innocuous condensation trails left by jets—and solar geoengineering, a theoretical stopgap to cool the planet that has been subject to much discussion and modeling research but has never been deployed in any large-scale way. One controversial form of solar geoengineering, known as stratospheric aerosol injection, would involve having high-altitude jets drop tiny aerosol particles—sulfur dioxide, most likely—into the stratosphere to act essentially as tiny mirrors. They would reflect a small amount of sunlight back into space, leaving less energy to reach the ground and contribute to warming. To date, attempts to launch physical experiments in this space have been shouted down, and only tiny—though still controversial—commercial efforts have taken place.  One can see why it gets lumped in with cloud seeding: bits of stuff, dumped into the sky, with the aim of altering what happens down below. But the aims are entirely separate; geoengineering would alter the global average temperature rather than having measurable effects on momentary cloudbursts or hailstorms. Some research has suggested that the practice could alter monsoon patterns, a significant issue given their importance to much of the world’s agriculture, but it remains a fundamentally different practice from cloud seeding. Still, the political conversation around supposed weather control often reflects this confusion. Greene, for instance, introduced a bill in July called the Clear Skies Act, which would ban all weather modification and geoengineering activities. (Greene’s congressional office did not respond to a request for comment.) And last year, Tennessee became the first state to enact a law to prohibit the “intentional injection, release, or dispersion, by any means, of chemicals, chemical compounds, substances, or apparatus … into the atmosphere with the express purpose of affecting temperature, weather, or the intensity of the sunlight.” Florida followed suit, with Governor Ron DeSantis signing SB 56 into law in June of this year for the same stated purpose. Also this year, lawmakers in more than 20 other states have also proposed some version of a ban on weather modification, often lumping it in with geoengineering, even though caution on the latter is more widely accepted or endorsed. “It’s not a conspiracy theory,” one Pennsylvania lawmaker who cosponsored a similar bill told NBC News. “All you have to do is look up.” Oddly enough, as Yeh of the University of Colorado points out, the places where bans have passed are states where weather modification isn’t really happening. “In a way, it’s easy for them to ban it, because, you know, nothing actually has to be done,” she says. In general, neither Florida nor Tennessee—nor any other part of the Southeast—needs any help finding rain. Basically, all weather modification activity in the US happens in the drier areas west of the Mississippi.  Finding a culprit Doricko told me that in the wake of the Texas disaster, he has seen more people become willing to learn about the true capabilities of cloud seeding and move past the more sinister theories about it.  I asked him, though, about some of his company’s flashier branding: Until recently, visitors to the Rainmaker website were greeted right up top with the slogan “Making Earth Habitable.” Might this level of hype contribute to public misunderstanding or fear?  He said he is indeed aware that Earth is, currently, habitable, and called the slogan a “tongue-in-cheek, deliberately provocative statement.” Still, in contrast to the academics who seem more comfortable acknowledging weather modification’s limits, he has continued to tout its revolutionary potential. “If we don’t produce more water, then a lot of the Earth will become less habitable,” he said. “By producing more water via cloud seeding, we’re helping to conserve the ecosystems that do currently exist, that are at risk of collapse.”  While other experts cited that 10% figure as a likely upper limit of cloud seeding’s effectiveness, Doricko said they could eventually approach 20%, though that might be years away. “Is it literally magic? Like, can I snap my fingers and turn the Sahara green? No,” he said. “But can it help make a greener, verdant, and abundant world? Yeah, absolutely.”  It’s not all that hard to see why people still cling to magical thinking here. The changing climate is, after all, offering up what’s essentially weaponized weather, only with a much broader and long-term mechanism behind it. There is no single sinister agency or company with its finger on the trigger, though it can be tempting to look for one; rather, we just have an atmosphere capable of holding more moisture and dropping it onto ill-prepared communities, and many of the people in power are doing little to mitigate the impacts. “Governments are not doing a good job of responding to the climate crisis; they are often captured by fossil-fuel interests, which drive policy, and they can be slow and ineffective when responding to disasters,” Naomi Smith, a lecturer in sociology at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia who has written about conspiracy theories and weather events, writes in an email. “It’s hard to hold all this complexity, and conspiracy theorizing is one way of making it intelligible and understandable.”   “Conspiracy theories give us a ‘big bad’ to point the finger at, someone to blame and a place to put our feelings of anger, despair, and grief,” she writes. “It’s much less satisfying to yell at the weather, or to engage in the sustained collective action we actually need to tackle climate change.” The sinister “they” in Greene’s accusations is, in other words, a far easier target than the real culprit.  Dave Levitan is an independent journalist, focused on science, politics, and policy. Find his work at davelevitan.com and subscribe to his newsletter at gravityisgone.com. 

On a gloomy Saturday morning this past May, a few months after entire blocks of Altadena, California, were destroyed by wildfires, several dozen survivors met at a local church to vent their built-up frustration, anger, blame, and anguish. As I sat there listening to one horror story after another, I almost felt sorry for the very polite consultants who were being paid to sit there, and who couldn’t do a thing about what they were hearing. Hosted by a third-party arbiter at the behest of Los Angeles County, the gathering was a listening session in which survivors could “share their experiences with emergency alerts and evacuations” for a report on how the response to the Eaton Fire months earlier had succeeded and failed.  It didn’t take long to see just how much failure there had been. This story is part of MIT Technology Review’s series “The New Conspiracy Age,” on how the present boom in conspiracy theories is reshaping science and technology. After a small fire started in the bone-dry brush of Pasadena’s Eaton Canyon early in the evening of Tuesday, January 7, 2025, the raging Santa Ana winds blew its embers into nearby Altadena, the historically Black and middle-class town just to the north. By Wednesday morning, much of it was burning. Its residents spent the night making frantic, desperate scrambles to grab whatever they could and get to safety.  In the aftermath, many claimed that they received no warning to evacuate, saw no first responders battling the blazes, and had little interaction with official personnel. Most were simply left to fend for themselves.  Making matters worse, while no place is “good” for a wildfire, Altadena was especially vulnerable. It was densely packed with 100-year-old wooden homes, many of which were decades behind on the code upgrades that would have better protected them. It was full of trees and other plants that had dried out during the rain-free winter. Few residents or officials were prepared for the seemingly remote possibility that the fires that often broke out in the mountains nearby would jump into town. As a result, resources were strained to the breaking point, and many homes simply burned freely.
So the people packed into the room that morning had a lot to be angry about. They unloaded their own personal ordeals, the traumas their community had experienced, and even catastrophes they’d heard about secondhand. Each was like a dagger to the heart, met with head-nods and “uh-huhs” from people all going through the same thing. LA County left us to die because we couldn’t get alerts! I’m sleeping in my car because I was a renter and have no insurance coverage! Millions of dollars in aid were raised for us, and we haven’t gotten anything! Developers are buying up Altadena and pricing out the Black families who made this place! The firefighting planes were grounded on purpose by Joe Biden so he could fly around LA! One of these things was definitely not like the others. And I knew why. Two trains collide It’s something of a familiar cycle by now: Tragedy hits; rampant misinformation and conspiracy theories follow. Think of the deluge of “false flag” and “staged gun grab” conspiracy theories after mass shootings, or the rampant disinformation around covid-19 and the 2020 election. It’s often even more acute in the case of a natural disaster, when conspiracy theories about what “really” caused the calamity run right into culture-war-driven climate change denialism. Put together, these theories obscure real causes while elevating fake ones, with both sides battling it out on social media and TV. 
I’ve studied these ideas extensively, having spent the last 10 years writing about conspiracy theories and disinformation as a journalist and researcher. I’ve covered everything from the rise of QAnon to whether Donald Trump faked his assassination attempt to the alarming rises in antisemitism, antivaccine conspiracism, and obsession with human trafficking. I’ve written three books, testified to Congress, and even written a report for the January 6th Committee. So this has been my life for quite a while.  Still, I’d never lived it. Not until the Eaton Fire. For a long time, I’d been able to talk about the conspiracy theories without letting them in. Now the disinformation was in the room with me, and it was about my life. My house, a cottage built in 1925, was one of those that burned back in January. Our only official notification to flee had come at 3:25 a.m., nine hours after the fires started. We grabbed what we could in 10 minutes, I locked our front door, and six hours later, it was all gone. We could have died. Eighteen Altadena residents did die—and all but one were in the area that was warned too late. Previously in my professional life, I’d always been able to look at the survivors of a tragedy, crying on TV about how they’d lost everything, and think sympathetically but distantly, Oh, those poor people. And soon enough, the conspiracy theories I was following about the incident for work would die down, and then it was no longer in my official purview—I could move on to the next disaster and whatever mess came with it.  Now I was one of those poor people. The Eaton Fire had changed everything about my life. Would it change everything about my work as well? It felt as though two trains I’d managed to keep on parallel tracks had collided. For a long time, I’d been able to talk about the conspiracy theories without letting them in. Now the disinformation was in the room with me, and it was about my life. And I wondered: Did I have a duty to journalism to push back on the wild thinking—or on this particular idea that Biden was responsible?  Or did I have a duty to myself and my sanity to just stay quiet? Just true enough In the days following the Eaton Fire, which coincided with another devastating fire in Los Angeles’ Pacific Palisades neighborhood, the Biden plane storyline was just one of countless rumors, false claims, hoaxes, and accusations about what had happened and who was behind them. Most were culture-war nonsense or political fodder. I also saw clearly fake AI slop (no, the Hollywood sign was not on fire) and bits of TikTok ephemera that could largely be ignored.  They were from something like an alternate world, one where forest floors hadn’t been “raked” and where incompetent “DEI firefighters” let houses burn while water waited in a giant spigot that California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, refused to “turn on” because he preferred to protect an endangered fish. There were claims that the fires were set on purpose to clear land for the Olympics, or to cover up evidence of human trafficking. Rumors flew that LA had donated all its firefighting money and gear to Ukraine. Some speculated that the fires were started by undocumented immigrants (one was suspected of causing one of the fires but never charged) or “antifa” or Black Lives Matter activists—never mind that one of the most demographically Black areas in the city was wiped out. Or, as always, it was the Jews. In this case, blame fell on a “wealthy Jewish couple” who supposedly owned most of LA’s water and wouldn’t let it go. These claims originated from the same “just asking questions” influencers who run the same playbook for every disaster. And they spread rapidly through X, a platform where breaking news had been drowned out by hysterical conspiracism.  But many did have elements of truth to them, surrounded by layers of lies and accusations. A few were just true enough to be impossible to dismiss out of hand, but also not actually true. So, for the record: Biden did not ground firefighting aircraft in Los Angeles.  According to fact-checking by both USA Today and Reuters, Biden flew into Los Angeles the day before the Eaton Fire broke out (which was also the same day that the Palisades Fire started, roughly 30 miles to the west), to dedicate two new national monuments. He left two days later. And while there were security measures in place, including flight restrictions over the area where he was staying, firefighting planes simply had to coordinate with air traffic controllers to cross into the closed-off space. 

But when my sort-of neighbor brought up this particular theory that day in May, I wasn’t able to debunk it. For one thing, this was my first time hearing the rumor. But more than that, what could I say that would assuage this man’s anger? And if he wanted to blame Biden for his house burning down, was it really my place to tell him he was wrong—even if he was?  It’s common for survivors of a disaster to be aware of only parts of the story, struggle to understand the full picture, or fail to fully recollect what happened to them in the moment of survival. Once the trauma ebbs, we’re left looking for answers and clarity and someone who knows what’s going on, because we certainly don’t have a clue. Hoaxes and misinformation stem from anger, confusion, and a lack of clear answers to rapidly evolving questions.   I can confirm that it was dizzying. Rumors and hoaxes were going around in my personal circles too, even if they weren’t so lurid and even if we didn’t really believe them. Bits of half-heard news circulated constantly in our group texts, WhatsApp chains, Facebook groups, and in-person gatherings.  There was confusion over who was responsible for the extent of the devastation, genuine anger about purported LA Fire Department budget cuts (though those had not actually happened to the extent conspiracists claimed they did), and fears that a Trump-controlled federal government would abandon California.  Many of the homes and businesses that we heard had burned down hadn’t, and others that we heard had survived were gone. In an especially heartbreaking early bit of misinformation, a local child-care facility shared a Facebook post stating that FEMA was handing out vouchers to pay 90% of your rent for the next three years—except FEMA doesn’t hand out rent vouchers without an application process. I quietly reached out to the source, who took it down.  In this information vacuum, and given my work, friends started asking me questions, and answering them took energy and time I didn’t have. Honestly, the “disinformation researcher” was largely just as clueless as everyone else.  Some of the questions were harmless enough. At one point a friend texted me about a picture from Facebook of a burned Bible page that survived the fire when everything else had turned to ash. It looked too corny and convenient to be real. But I had also found a burned page of Psalms that had survived. I kept it in a ziplock bag because it seemed like the right thing to do. So I told my friend I didn’t know if it was real. I still don’t—but I also still have that ziplock somewhere. Under attack As weeks passed, we began to deal with another major issue where truth and misinformation walked together: the reasonable worry that a new president who constantly belittled California would not be willing to provide relief funds. 
Recovery depended on FEMA to distribute grants, on the EPA to clear toxic debris, on the Small Business Administration to make loans for rebuilding or repairing homes, on the Army Corps of Engineers to remove the detritus of burned structures, and so much more. How would this square with the new “government efficiency” mandate touting the trillions of dollars and tens of thousands of jobs to be cut from the federal budget?  Nobody knew—including the many kind government employees who spent months in Altadena helping us recover while silently wondering if they were about to be fired.
We dealt with scammers, grifters, squatters, thieves, and even tow truck companies that simply stole cars parked outside burned lots and held them for ransom. After a decade of helping people recognize scams and frauds, there was little I could do when they came for us. Many residents of Altadena began to have trepidation about accepting government assistance, particularly in its Black community, which already had a well-earned deep distrust of the federal government. Many Black residents felt that their needs and stories were being left behind in the recovery, and feared they would be the first to be priced out of whatever Altadena would become in the future. Outreach in person became critical. I happened to meet the two-star general in charge of the Army Corps’ effort at lunch one day, as he and his team tried to find outside-the-box ways to engage with exhausted and wary residents. He told me they had tried to use technology—texts, emails, clips designed to go viral—but it was too much information, all apparently delivered in the wrong way. Many of the people they needed to reach, particularly older residents, didn’t use social media, weren’t able to communicate well via text, and were easy prey for sophisticated scammers. It was also easy for the real information to get lost as we got bombarded with communications, including many from hoaxers and frauds. This, too, wasn’t new to me. Many of the movements I’ve covered are awash in grift and worthless wellness products. I know the signs of a scam and a snake-oil salesman. Still, I watched helplessly as my friends and my community, desperate for help, were turned into chum for cash-hungry sharks opening their jaws wide.  The community was hammered by dodgy contractors and fly-by-night debris removal companies, relief scams and phony grants, and spam calls from “repair companies” and builders. We dealt with scammers, grifters, squatters, thieves, and even tow truck companies that simply stole cars parked outside burned lots and held them for ransom. We were also victimized by looting: Abandoned wires on our lot were stripped for copper, and our neighbor’s unlocked garage was ransacked. After a decade of helping people recognize scams and frauds, there was little I could do when they came for us. The fear of being conned was easily transmittable, even to me personally. After hearing of friends who couldn’t get a FEMA grant because a previous owner of their home had fraudulently filed an application, we delayed our own appointment with FEMA for weeks. The agency’s call had come so out of the blue that we were convinced it was fake. Maybe my job made me overcautious, or maybe we were just paralyzed by the sheer tonnage of decisions and calls that needed to be handled. Whatever the reason, the fear meant we later had to make multiple calls just to get our meeting rescheduled. It’s a small thing, but when you’re as exhausted and dispirited as we were, there are no small things.  Contractors for the US Army Corps of Engineers remove hazardous materials from a home destroyed in the Eaton Fire, near a burned-out car.STEPHANIE ARNETT/MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | GETTY IMAGES Making all this even more frustrating was that the scammers, the people spinning tales of lasers and endangered fish and antifa, were very much ignoring the reality: that our planet is trying to kill us. While federal officials recently made an arrest in the Palisades Fire, the direct causes of that fire and the nearby Eaton Fire may still take years of investigation and litigation to be fully known. But even now, it can’t be denied to any reasonable degree that climate change worsened the wind that made the fires spread more quickly.
The Santa Ana winds bombarding Southern California were among the worst ever to hit the region. Their ferocity drove the embers well beyond the nominal fire danger line, particularly in Altadena. Many landed in brush left brittle and dead by the decades-long drought plaguing California. And they had even more fuel because the previous two winters had been among the wettest in the region’s recent history. Such rapid swings between wet and dry or cold and hot have become so common around the world that they even have a name: climate whiplash.  There are the conspiracy theory gurus who see this and make money off it, peddling disinformation on their podcasts and livestreams, while blaming everyone and everything but the real reasons. Many of these figures have spent decades railing against the very idea that the climate could change. And if it is changing, they claimed, human consumption and urbanization have nothing to do with it. When faced with a disaster that undeniably reflected climate change at work, their business models—which rely on sales of subscriptions and merchandise—demanded that they just keep denying it was climate change at work. As more cities and countries deal with “once in a century” climate disasters, I have no doubt that these figures will continue to deflect attention away from human activity. They will use crackpot science, conspiracy theories, politics, and—increasingly—fake videos depicting whatever AI can generate. They will prey on their audiences’ limited understanding of basic science, their inability to perceive how climate and weather differ, and their fears that globalist power brokers will somehow use the weather against them. And their message will spread with little pushback from social media platforms more concerned with virality and shareholder value than truth. Resisting the temptation When you cover disinformation and live through an event creating a massive volume of disinformation, it’s like floating outside your body on an operating table as your heart is being worked on, while also being a heart surgeon. I knew I should be trying to help. But I did not have the mental capacity, the time, or, to be honest, the interest in covering what the worst people on the internet were saying about the worst time of my life. I had very real questions about where my family would live. Thinking about my career was not a priority. 
But of course, these experiences cannot now be excised from my career. I’ve spent a lot of time talking about how trauma influences conspiracism; see how the isolation and boredom of covid created a new generation of conspiracy theory believers. And now I had my own trauma, and it has been a test of my abilities as a journalist and a thinker to avoid falling into the pit of despair. At the same time, I have a much deeper understanding of the psychology at work in conspiracy belief. One of the biggest reasons conspiracy theories take off after a disaster is that they serve to make sense out of something that makes no sense. Neighborhoods aren’t supposed to burn down in an era of highly trained firefighters and seemingly fireproof materials. They especially aren’t supposed to burn down in Los Angeles, one of the wealthiest cities on the planet. These were seven- and eight-figure homes going up like matches. There must be a reason, people figured. Someone, or something, must be responsible. So, as I emerge from the haze to something resembling “normal,” I feel more compassion and understanding for trauma victims who turn to conspiracy theories. Having faced the literal burning down of my life, I get the urge to assign meaning to such a calamity and point a finger at whoever we think did it to us.  Meanwhile, the people of Altadena and Pacific Palisades continue to slowly put our lives and communities back together. The effects of both our warming planet and our disinformation crisis continue to assert themselves every day. It’s still alluring to look for easy answers in outrageous conspiracy theories, but such answers are not real and offer no actual help—only the illusion of help. It’s equally tempting for someone who researches and debunks conspiracy theories to mock or belittle the people who believe these ideas. How could anyone be so dumb as to think Joe Biden caused the fire that burned down my home? I kept my mouth shut that day at the meeting in the church, though, again, I can now sympathize much more deeply with something I’d otherwise think completely inane.  But even a journalist who lost his house is still a journalist. So I decided early on that what I really needed to do was keep Altadena in the news. I went on TV and radio, blogged, and happily told our story to anyone who asked. I focused on the community, the impact, the people who would be working to recover long after the national spotlight moved to the next shiny object. If there is a professional lesson to be taken from this nightmare, it might be that the people caught up in tragedies are exactly that: caught up. And those who believe this nonsense find something of value in it. They find hope and comfort and the reassurance that whoever did this to them will get what they deserve.  I could have done it too, throwing away years of experience to embrace conspiracist nihilism in the face of unspeakable trauma. After all, those poor people going through this weren’t just on my TV.  They were my friends. They were me. They could be anyone. Mike Rothschild is a journalist and an expert on the growth and impact of conspiracy theories and disinformation. He has written three books, including The Storm Is Upon Us, about the QAnon conspiracy movement, and Jewish Space Lasers, about the myths around the Rothschild banking family. He also is a frequent expert witness in legal cases involving conspiracy theories and has spoken at colleges and conferences around the country. He lives in Southern California.

MIT Technology Review’s How To series helps you get things done. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Someone I know became a conspiracy theorist seemingly overnight. It was during the pandemic, and out of nowhere, they suddenly started posting daily on Facebook about the dangers of covid vaccines and masks, warning of an attempt to control us and keep us in our places. The government had planned it all; it was part of a wider plot by a group of shadowy pedophile elites who ran the world. The World Economic Forum was involved in some way, and Bill Gates, natch. The claims seemed to get wilder by the day. I didn’t always follow. As a science and technology journalist, I felt that my duty was to respond. So I did, occasionally posting long debunking responses to their posts. I thought facts alone (uncertain as they were at the time) would help me win the argument. But all I got was derision. I was so naive, apparently. I eventually blocked this person for the sake of my own mental health. This story is part of MIT Technology Review’s series “The New Conspiracy Age,” on how the present boom in conspiracy theories is reshaping science and technology. Over the years since, I’ve often wondered: Could I have helped more? Are there things I could have done differently to talk them back down and help them see sense?  I should have spoken to Sander van der Linden, professor of social psychology in society at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Foolproof, a book about misinformation and how we make ourselves less susceptible to it. 
As part of MIT Technology Review’s package on conspiracies, I gave him a call to ask: What would he advise if one of our family members or friends showed signs of having fallen down the rabbit hole? Step 1: Start with “pre-bunking” The best way to avoid the conspiracy theory vortex is, of course, not to set foot in there in the first place. That’s the idea behind “pre-bunking,” an approach to dealing with conspiracies that works a lot like vaccination (the irony) against disease. By getting “inoculated” with knowledge about how conspiracy theories work, we become better prepared to spot the real thing when we come across it. 
The concept stems from work in the 1960s by the social psychologist William McGuire, who was looking for ways to protect US soldiers from being indoctrinated by enemies. He came up with the idea of a “vaccine for brainwash.” “Conspiracy theorists tend to negatively react to debunking and fact-checking … they become more aggressive and sort of double down in their beliefs,” says van der Linden. “But with the pre-bunking approach, they seem to be open to entertaining it.” One of the most effective means of pre-bunking is to refrain from arguing about the facts of the matter and, instead, simply show people how they might be manipulated. This works best as part of a wider media literacy campaign, if you can reach people before they’re exposed to misinformation and conspiracy theories, but he says pre-bunking can also work as a therapy for people who are already partly radicalized. (As with an infection, it’s always better to avoid catching it in the first place than to treat the symptoms later, the thinking goes.)  The idea is to help people understand what rhetorical techniques have been used on them. It gives them the chance to think about how they might have been tricked. Maybe they fell for emotional storytelling (using emotional cues to reduce someone’s inclination to critically assess the core claims) or false dichotomies (making it appear there are only two sides to a topic, and you have to choose one). “One of the things we found is that conspiracy theorists hate manipulation, and they hate the idea of being manipulated,” van der Linden says.  “I kind of zoom out and deconstruct the manipulation techniques [and ask], Who’s benefiting from this? Who’s making money off of it? What are their incentives? And can you be duped by this?” To scale this approach, he and his colleagues worked with Google Jigsaw (which focuses on projects aimed more or less at the public good) to produce pre-bunking videos that were posted on YouTube. They also created various online pre-bunking games that can expose common deceptions, including Bad Vaxx, launched this summer, which helps expose some misinformation techniques often used in the antivaccine community. In a study published in August, the game was shown to be highly effective at improving people’s ability to spot misinformation. 
Step 2: Validate some aspects of their worldview The next approach might seem strange to some. Essentially, you have to agree with the conspiracy believer, at least a little bit.  “Generally, if you want to start a conversation with people, it goes better when you first validate [their] worldview before you raise a challenging argument or point,” he says. The way you do this is to address the fact that, in some cases, conspiracies have proved to be real. Watergate was a real conspiracy. Pharmaceutical companies have been shown to conspire to defraud the public in the past. But that doesn’t mean every conspiracy theory is true.  “You’re first validating their viewpoint that bad people sometimes conspire. And then you say, okay, but not this one,” says van der Linden, who calls this a “gateway.”
By offering recognition that conspiracies exist, you let people know that you’re not rejecting everything they say—your issue is more with one specific belief.  “Look, financial fraud happens, right? And there’s forensic accountants and other people who detect and prosecute conspiracies like that,” he says. “But people in their basement googling, you know, satanic pedophile conspiracies are not going to arrive at real evidence. And so there’s a differentiation.” Step 3: Talk to them about where the scientific or social consensus lies One of the problems with conspiracy theories in the age of social media is it’s very easy to reaffirm your new beliefs, find communities that believe them too, and then interact only with those people. Very quickly, one can start to think a particular theory is more widely believed than is really the case. It can be helpful to let conspiracy theorists understand that their view is a pretty far-out one, or at least not widely held among experts. If you can present the true scientific consensus on a topic (for example, the overwhelming majority of climate scientists believe that anthropogenic climate change is real and an existing threat), that can have an effect on certain at-risk people.
“Most people don’t like to hold views that are extremist,” he says. “So when people realize that their views are far outside of the norm, they don’t like that.” The approach has mixed success, but he says it can be particularly effective when discussing conspiracy theories around scientific issues, such as climate or vaccinations. However, he emphasizes that this really works well only for people who are merely flirting with conspiracy theories but are not yet too far gone. For those who are fully committed to the theory, this kind of intervention might fall on deaf ears. “It works less well for die-hard conspiracy theorists because they’re motivated by this need for uniqueness, like everyone else is the ‘sheeple’ and they want to be unique, and so being different from the norm is actually what gives them motivation,” he cautions. Step 4: Show them examples of others who have broken out of conspiracy thinking In extreme cases, hearing from or about someone who was deeply radicalized but subsequently broke free can be extremely effective, says van der Linden. In his work with conspiracy theorists, he often borrows quotes or stories from former believers or those who have been under the control of a cult. 
For example, Brent Lee, a former 9/11 truther and someone who had fully bought into an array of conspiracy theories, now spends his time trying to help other conspiracy theorists see the problems with their beliefs, speaking at conferences and on podcasts about his time in that world. Someone “who used to be in those groups,” says van der Linden, “is much more persuasive, sometimes, than any scientist or outsider.” 
Step 5: Let them know you care—and watch for isolation Lastly, just being aware of changes in the behavior of your family and friends can be vital. Warning signs include becoming noticeably close-minded about explanations for things that are happening around them. “When people start to sort of switch off from other explanations in the world,” says van der Linden, “that’s kind of the usual path to becoming more radical.” Another major predictor is when people start showing low faith in official outlets, he says. “When people start losing trust in mainstream media, in official explanations, that pulls them toward alternative sources that usually spread conspiracy theories.”   It’s worth keeping an eye out in case loved ones are becoming isolated from others around them, something that is often a red flag. If you’re at risk of becoming radicalized online, you need people around you who are “constantly distracting you and kind of questioning this stuff and [who can] bring you back to reality,” says van der Linden. “What I’ve learned is the best way to keep people from radicalizing is actually by staying in touch, because the main thing that happens is that they start isolating themselves because they have fringe beliefs, and then they become more extreme, and they lose more trust, and that makes them more vulnerable to radicalization.  “So actually, just getting people out away from their computer and doing social things and staying in touch with them regularly is one of the best defenses,” he says. Finally, if you get a chance to sit down and talk to the family member or friend you’re trying to help, one approach can help break through: Let them know you care about their well-being, and that’s why you’re there. Show that while you don’t agree with this particular belief, that doesn’t change how you feel about them. “Just to say, ‘Look, you’re my brother, you’re my sister, my family member. I love you. I care about you,’” says van der Linden. “You need some sort of validation.”