Tin Foil Hats Anonymous

With our panel about conspiracy theories coming to an end, I would like to reflect on today’s discussion and what we, as a group, found interesting throughout the discussion. For our panel, we discussed the positive and negatives of conspiracy theories along with what counter technology could be used to help with the negatives. We started off with a video about conspiracies and why people believe them, and then moved onto some starter questions for our group. Caitlyn did a great job opening our discussion with the class today. It was interesting to see what conspiracy theories our peers believed in or have research themselves. For example, many of our classmates believed in alien-related conspiracy theories. And if they did not believe in them then they were at least open minded to hearing what others had to say. As we moved on in our discussion we asked our peers the positives and negatives of conspiracy theories. Meghan and I talked about the differences between these and how there can be positives and negatives. I talked about how if society puts enough pressure we can sometimes debunk or find out the truth about a theory. We then explained our points and it matched a lot of what our peers had to say. Meghan talked about how damaging it can be for survivors when people who believe 9/11 was a hoax, believe that the Hollocaust did not happen and that the Sandy Hook shooting was created by actors that were hired by the government. We then as a whole class talked about the difficulties negative conspiracy theories create for others. Many of our peers agreed that these such conspiracies are dangerous to our world. Such beliefs can be emotionally and mentally damaging to survivors as they learn to cope after such tragic events. Although we know that the conspiracy theorists who believe 9/11 was an inside job, it is shocking when you hear the people believe it was fake or an inside job done by President Bush at the time. A great and yet unfortunate example a peer brought up was that she and her boyfriend personally knew people who worked in the Twin Towers and people who live in New York. The people she knew witnessed this tragic event yet there are other people out there who, even with the amount of proof society has, still do not believe in it. After this part of our discussion, we moved onto our counter technology. Destiny did a great job of discussing the counter technologies we wanted to talk about. She explained to the class how in Germany it is illegal to be a Nazi, and in order for high schoolers to graduate secondary school they have to visit the sites of concertration camps, and museums. We then came together to ask our peers their thoughts on the counter technologies and if they thought if they would be beneficial to other countries that do not implement them. Our group found in interesting when some students thought that counter technologies could be in a sense a waste, as there will always be people who will have these negative theories no matter what. They think is a great idea but unfortunately, there is a big chance that such counter technologies have no power over the conspiracy theorists. We ended our discussion with one final question; what did they take away from this lesson? And the responses were great. Some believe that no matter what we do there will always be negative conspiracy theories due to a constant distrust, and the power trips the theorist(s) crave. And some believed that if we talk about such events enough and use counter technologies then society can diminish negative theories.