- The coronavirus pandemic has created a surge in conspiracy theories, with false claims about the virus being spread online.
- Some conspiracy theories include the belief that the virus is harmless or doesn't exist, or that it is a result of biological warfare or created by the pharmaceutical industry.
- The theories have led to real-world actions, such as people demanding to see coronavirus patients in hospitals.
- Conspiracy theories are appealing because they provide explanations for chaotic events and appeal to the human tendency to assume big events have big causes.
- Conspiracy theories have always been popular during global health crises, but the internet has made it easier for people to spread misinformation and make it look authoritative.
- The documentary "Plandemic" is an example of how conspiracy theories can be presented as credible, even though they are based on false information and absurd claims.
- It is important to be aware of and debunk conspiracy theories, as they can be harmful and lead to people ignoring best practices like social distancing.

- The director of the film Plandemic stands behind it despite criticism
- The phrase "believe all women" does not apply to Dr. Majkiewicz's claims about coronavirus prevention
- Conspiracy theories are self-sealing and can spread easily on the internet
- The current president of the United States has spread numerous conspiracy theories
- People who believe COVID-19 is overblown have suffered consequences
- Social media companies are trying to label and limit the spread of conspiracy theories, but it is difficult due to the volume of material
- Individuals need to be skeptical of conspiracy theories and ask rational, non-conspiracy explanations
- Scrutiny by experts and plausibility are important factors in evaluating conspiracy theories
- It is important to have conversations with people who believe in conspiracy theories and approach them with empathy and critical thinking
- Alex Trebek and John Cena have made videos urging people to be careful with what they encounter and share online.

- The video emphasizes the importance of fact-checking information found online
- Various celebrities, including Alex Trebek, John Cena, Paul Rudd, Catherine O'Hara, and Billy Porter, have made messages urging people to think critically
- The celebrities highlight the need to verify information from trusted sources and experts
- They encourage using common sense and critical thinking skills to educate oneself during difficult times
- The full videos of the celebrities' messages can be found at thetruthtruthtruth.com
- The video concludes by thanking the viewers and suggesting that the celebrities' videos can be a good conversation starter.

- The coronavirus pandemic has led to a surge in conspiracy theories, with false claims about the virus being spread online.
- Some theories include the belief that the virus is harmless or doesn't exist, or that it is a result of biological warfare or created by the pharmaceutical industry.
- Conspiracy theories can lead to real-world actions, such as demanding to see coronavirus patients in hospitals.
- The internet has made it easier for people to spread misinformation and make conspiracy theories look authoritative.
- The documentary "Plandemic" is an example of a conspiracy theory presented as credible, despite being based on false information.
- It is important to debunk conspiracy theories as they can be harmful and lead to people ignoring best practices.
- Social media companies are trying to label and limit the spread of conspiracy theories, but it is difficult due to the volume of material.
- Skepticism, rationality, and conversations with empathy are important in addressing conspiracy theories.
- Celebrities like Alex Trebek and John Cena have made videos urging people to be careful with what they encounter and share online, emphasizing the importance of fact-checking and critical thinking.

With conspiracy theories about coronavirus proliferating, John Oliver discusses why we’re prone to believe, how to distinguish fact from fiction, and what you can do to help others.

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Our main story tonight concerns conspiracy theories, voted definitely true by dipshit Uncle Quarterly.

Now, you're probably familiar with at least some conspiracy theories, like the claim that the moon landing was faked, or the argument that the Earth is flat and that scientists are covering it up.

And that is a theory that led to this absolutely stunning YouTube video.

We're surrounded by walls of ice And we clearly live inside of a glass

And putting aside the factual inaccuracies, slant rhymes, shoehorned lyrics, and the bad Adele, or solid Bjork impression, my favorite part of that is the comment, holy crap, this is amazing, I'm gonna share this around the world.

But as you've probably guessed, the reason that we need to talk about this is that the coronavirus has created a perfect storm for conspiracy theorists.

Because their theories are now everywhere.

Over the last few weeks, some people have been saying online that the virus is harmless, or even that it doesn't exist.

Numerous sites and groups online have been falsely claiming that this virus is a result of some sort of biological warfare, some sort of bioweapon, or even created by the pharmaceutical industry to try to sell more vaccines.

You know, when they turn this on, it's gonna kill everyone.

A woman in Britain called workers killers for laying 5G fiber optic cables.

When they turn that switch on, bye-bye, Mama.

Okay, there is so much wrong there, but most of all, the only time an English person should be saying bye-bye, Mama, is when they're physically leaving the womb.

Bye-bye, Mama, Thank you for an excellent delivery.

And after that, it's, yes, Mom, no, Mom, and thank you kindly for wiping off my shameful buttocks, much obliged.

And those theories are just the tip of the iceberg here.

You might have seen this video of 2 doctors making a now-debunked claim that COVID death rates were exaggerated because it was all over Facebook a couple of months ago, or maybe came across Plandemic, a pseudo-documentary filled with a hodgepodge of conspiracy theories.

In just 1 week, it was viewed over 8000000 times, which is a shockingly high number, because that means it's been seen more times than this TikTok of a cat matching a piano's pitch.

♪ ♪ Good cat, you deserve more views.

And the problem is, some online theories have already prompted some worrying real-world actions.

Take the hashtag, film your hospital, which spread after some claimed that the severity of the pandemic was being exaggerated and urged people to expose the truth.

That, unfortunately, led to videos like this 1, where a man angrily demands hospital staff show him their coronavirus patients, and then shouts at them as he drives away.

Maybe you could call the governor and tell him about the hoax.

And can you imagine how confused that man is whenever he tries to check into a hotel?

Where are the depressed salesmen attempting autoerotic asphyxiation in your lobby?

Maybe you should call the governor of this Best Western and tell him, your sign is a hoax.

And the harms of conspiracy theories during a pandemic go far beyond confused hospital workers.

As 1 study pointed out, given the transmissibility of COVID-19, these beliefs are dangerous even if only a fraction of Americans succumbing to them ignore best practices such as social distancing.

So tonight, let's talk about conspiracy theories, particularly why they're so appealing, how to spot them, and what you might be able to do about it.

And let's start with the fact that these theories are a lot more popular than you might think.

Polls over the years have shown that over half of Americans consistently endorse at least 1 sort of conspiratorial narrative.

Embarrassingly, there's a part of me that thinks the royal family had Princess Diana killed.

I know that they didn't, because there's absolutely no evidence that they did.

But the idea still lingers, because it felt too big an event to be accidental.

And experts will say that that is actually a huge draw of conspiracy theories.

They help explain a chaotic, uncertain world and appeal to the human impulse to what's called proportionality bias.

Which is the tendency to assume that big events must have big causes.

And the very idea that a lone gunman could cause such chaos was inherently unsatisfying.

So people, perhaps understandably, reached for a much bigger answer.

Although it is revealing that conversely, less impactful events have attracted significantly less speculation.

The attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan was a similar event in all regards, except that the president survived.

It was a smaller event in terms of its outcome, and therefore, we're satisfied with smaller explanations.

And so there have been almost no conspiracy theories about the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan, either at the time or subsequently.

And that kind of makes sense, doesn't it?

1 man suddenly changing the world is inconceivable.

1 man failing miserably isn't remotely surprising.

Something which is also, incidentally, the tagline for feminism.

And the appeal of conspiracy theories is such that people can even embrace ones that contradict 1 another.

1 study found the more participants believed that Princess Diana faked her own death, the more they believed that she was murdered.

Which sounds crazy, although, if there is 1 expert on something being demonstrably dead, yet technically alive at the same time, it was probably the woman stuck in a loveless marriage with Prince Charles for 15 years.

The point is, these theories have always been appealing and have actually been particularly seductive during global health crises.

In the 14th century, conspiracy theorists claimed that Jewish people were responsible for the bubonic plague in 1890.

And newspaper claims the electric light was responsible for a global influenza outbreak.

And in 1918, rumors spread that German pharmaceutical company, Bayer, had tainted its U.S.

Sold aspirin tablets with the so-called Spanish flu.

The only difference now is that our current pandemic is coming in the age of the internet, when it's not only easier for people to do bad research and spread their results, but it's also possible for them to make material look startlingly authoritative.

At first view, it looks like a high-budget true crime documentary with fancy graphics and drone footage.

And it deploys those techniques to tell the story of Judy Mikovits, a former scientist at the National Cancer Institute who's depicted as a whistleblower on the scientific establishment.

Here is how the film presents a key moment in Mika Witz's narrative, where she claims her enemies had her arrested without cause.

Our neighbors are looking at what's going on here.

You know, they searched my house without a warrant.

The police surrounding her house, using violent force, and eventually throwing her in jail without cause.

First, she was absolutely criminally charged, as stated in a lawsuit that she herself later filed over the arrest, Maikiewicz was arrested on criminal charges.

And when a reporter pointed this out to her, she said she meant the charges were later dropped, adding, I've been confused for a decade and that I'll try to learn to say it differently.

Second, while that arrest footage looks dramatic, it is not actually from her arrest at all.

It's from an unrelated SWAT raid, and is literally the first result you get when you search house raid on a stock footage website.

Because if they'd simply worked a little harder and searched house raid on other stock footage sites, they could have found this video of a masked robber spanking himself, then flipping the bird, and dancing around like a maniac.

And that's not just objectively better than the clip they chose, it's also exactly as relevant.

And the issue isn't just that the film misrepresents Mike Avitz's backstory, it's that in doing so, they lend her an air of credibility when they allow her to make unchallenged, bat-shit medical claims like these.

Wearing the mask literally activates your own virus.

You're getting sick from your own reactivated coronavirus expressions.

And if it happens to be SARS-CoV-2, then you've got a big problem.

You've got sequences in the soil, in the sand.

You've got healing microbes in the ocean, in the salt water.

The idea that wearing a mask activates your own virus is absurd.

In debunking it, PolitiFact said, there is no evidence to support this, and then threw in, we're not sure what a coronavirus expression even is.

As for the idea that there are healing microbes at the beach, look, I don't want to be the depressing guy that tells you going to the beach won't cure coronavirus, but I will say the beach is exactly 3 things, none of which are medicine.

It's sand that goes down your ass crack, salt water that gets up your nose, and sun that burns your skin.

The beach doesn't cure anything except you being comfortable.

And incidentally, when we reached out to the director of Plandemic to cite our many issues with the film, he wrote back, not only saying that he stands behind it, but asking, in a country that marches to the chant of believe all women, why is it that people are so quick to disbelieve Dr.

To which the answer is obviously, A, because she's telling people good coronavirus prevention involves not wearing a mask and going boogie boarding.

B, the phrase is believe women, not believe all women.

And C, that's not what that phrase is about because the point of that movement is not, well, I guess we all have to take Rachel Dolezal at her fucking word now.

And look, I am well aware that for some, even these criticisms of Plandemic will somehow be further proof that what it's saying is true.

That is actually a common trait of conspiracy theories, that they're inherently self-sealing, with any criticism just becoming evidence that the whole thing is bigger than anyone could have imagined.

Although, I will simply say this, if I am in on this conspiracy, that means my puppet master is AT&T.

And what makes you think that they can pull off a global conspiracy when they can barely pull off a complete phone call?

How would they even be sending me orders?

The point is, these theories can be innately appealing and, thanks to the Internet, can spread with ease.

And all of this would be dangerous enough before you take into account that 1 of the most prominent spreaders of conspiracies on Earth is the current president of the United States.

Because he's been spreading them around for years, often with the excuse that people are saying them and he's just asking questions.

Something he's done on bullshit claims like Obama was born in Kenya, Antonin Scalia was murdered, and that millions of fake votes were cast for Hillary Clinton.

Conspiracies are sort of like ugly buildings and deeply tragic adult children, and that Donald Trump loves to unleash them into the world and then refuse to take responsibility for them ever again.

And he's been doing this throughout the pandemic, including just this week when he retweeted a theory that the CDC and the media are lying about the virus to hurt his re-election chances.

Trump has passed on so many conspiracies, the news outlets have repeatedly called him the conspiracy theorist in chief.

Although, I would argue, he's not invested in any of these things that he's spreading.

He's only interested in amplifying whatever he thinks he might personally benefit from.

And I cannot believe I'm saying this, but the person with the clearest sense of just how deeply cynical Trump's use of conspiracy theories is, is this guy.

When you get to Trump and his conspiracy theories, he does it in a really clever way.

Trump never says that he believes these conspiracy theories that he touts.

It's his way of getting these conspiracy theories out there.

So Trump is just throwing gasoline on a fire here.

And that's a sentence I never thought I'd say unless I was talking about toilet-transmitted chlamydia.

But the thing is, right now in particular, there is real harm in throwing gasoline on the fire because people are going to get burned, making those flames not quite as fucking fun to watch.

Because make no mistake here, people who have been convinced that COVID was overblown have sometimes paid a steep price.

Around this time last month, Jupiter ride share driver Brian Hitchens was a self-proclaimed COVID-19 skeptic.

I thought it was maybe the government was trying something that...

Kind of like they threw kind of distract us.

Fast and Hitchens has a whole his hospital bed.

This is a real virus that you've got to take serious.

And unfortunately, I don't think he's gonna be the last person in this country to learn that a lot of what's on the internet is bullshit the hard way.

Well, social media companies are finally doing more to label conspiracy theories or limit their spread.

But the truth is, they can only do so much.

They don't always have the expertise to litigate what is and isn't true.

And the sheer volume of material flying around makes it almost impossible for them to catch everything.

And that's actually been a challenge for us in this story, too.

We are clearly only scratching the surface of what is out there.

And I'm sure if you look down at the comments section when this is on YouTube, you will find people saying, how about the fact the virus was created as a bioweapon?

Or what about Bill Gates' plan to microchip me?

And it would take days to go through why each 1 of those is bullshit, and it still won't address the ones that come up in the weeks and the months ahead.

The fact is, it's gonna be incumbent upon us as individuals to try and spot these theories and treat them with a skeptical eye before we believe them, or indeed, spread them around.

And there are actually 3 basic questions that you can ask yourself that could help in that regard.

First, is there a rational, non-conspiracy explanation?

Because remember the theory 5G towers are spreading coronavirus, or as that 1 woman so memorably phrased it...

It made the rounds helped by images like these, showing maps of coronavirus cases alongside maps of the 5G rollout.

And initially, the similarity there does seem striking until you realize Those maps also look like the ones of population density, which makes a lot more sense.

Because that's correlation, not causation.

Wi-Fi rollouts and virus cases will both be where there are a lot of people.

In fact, lots of maps look like those maps.

This 1 of Domino's pizza locations looks like a map of coronavirus outbreaks.

And I'm pretty sure Domino's pizza isn't causing it.

Yes, their Wisconsin 6 cheese will give you a dry cough, fever, diarrhea, and COVID toe, but not in the exact same way as the coronavirus, and knowing the difference is called science.

Now, the second question you could ask is, has this been held up to scrutiny by experts?

Because it's not uncommon for theories to cite a single source, a doctor or scientist, like severely Midwestern Diane Keaton here, making an outlandish claim.

But it's worth checking if most credible doctors or scientists agree with them.

And if you're thinking, well, what if all of them are in on the cover-up too, that actually brings us to our final question here.

How plausible is this conspiracy as a practical matter?

Because not every conspiracy theory is fictional, obviously.

Some have absolutely turned out to be true, but the very fact that we know about the real ones actually teaches us something important.

1 study looked at real government secrets like Edward Snowden's revelations about government surveillance and found the reason they unraveled was because of the sheer number of people who had to keep them secret.

They actually created an equation to predict how quickly other science-based conspiracy theories would have unraveled had they been true, finding that faking the moon landing, for instance, would have required an estimated 411,000 people to keep quiet and would have broken down in just over 3 and a half years.

Because think for a second, just how many people would have to be sworn to secrecy to keep a coronavirus hoax under wraps.

I don't know if you've ever tried to organize, say, a mid-sized surprise party for your cousin, but it's borderline impossible to keep it quiet because someone is telling Roxanne.

No matter how many emails you've sent saying, no 1 tell Roxanne, Roxanne is finding out.

And I know, you may not find conspiracy theories plausible, but you also may know people who do.

And while you can't reach everyone, you can reach some.

And now more than ever, it might be important for you to try, which clearly is not easy.

It is completely natural to simply want to scream at them, why do you believe this nonsense, you titanic fucking idiot?

And I would say, just show them this piece.

But obviously, I'm not the best messenger.

Within the first 20 seconds of this story, I called your uncle a dipshit.

Now, What experts say is that the most effective way to approach someone is not by shaming them for believing something or overwhelming them with counter evidence, but to try and be empathetic, meet them where they are, and nudge them to think a bit more critically.

So to that end, We've asked some people that they might be more willing to listen to, to help you start a conversation.

For instance, let's say your confused grandparents are passing around dangerous misinformation about not wearing a mask.

They may not listen to me, but they might listen to the man that they've been letting into their home every weeknight to calmly tell them what is and isn't correct.

The correct question, of course, who is that handsome man I'm looking at right now?

Yeah, We got Alex Trebek to make a 90-second video gently urging anyone who watches it to be careful with what they encounter and share online.

So you could show your grandparents that and then talk to them about it.

But let's say you've got a cousin who's not a Jeopardy fan.

Maybe they like wrestling or Fast and Furious movies.

Well, the good news is, John Cena has got something to say to them, too.

There's a lot of official-looking stuff on the internet.

And there's some stuff that seems false, but isn't.

John Oliver and I are the exact same age.

Yup, born on the same year on the exact same day.

It seems impossible that 2 human bodies can age so differently.

So before you go believe any theory about the pandemic or share any information about the pandemic, it's good to know where that information's coming from.

You should check information you see online, and we are the exact same age.

It's a thing that I think about every birthday.

And it's not just Alex Trebek and John Cena.

We have an assortment of truly beloved figures, from Paul Rudd to Catherine O'Hara to Billy Porter, each of whom made messages to urge people to think more critically.

John Cena here, WWE superstar, actor, internet meme, dessert lover, and number 3 on your partner's free pass list.

I know that we are living in scary times.

Given the current state of things, you're searching for answers about the global health crisis.

If nobody ever asked questions, Jeopardy would be a very, very weird show, wouldn't it?

But you have to be careful, because there's a lot of convincing looking shit on the internet, and most of it ain't true.

You know, I once thought I was dead because hashtag RIP Paul Rudd was trending.

So before you go off and share something with your friends and family,

to know where that information's coming from.

If you're not sure, look to see if other trusted news sources and experts are saying the same thing.

an idea or story that you've read about holds water is if a majority of trusted sources agree on it.

You have the look of a scholar and the taste of a macaroon.

Use it like it's the first roll of toilet paper in a brand new

Trust that part of your brain to guide you as you educate yourself during this difficult time.

And trust that I'm doing what I can to hop to number 1 on your partner's free pass list and number 3 on yours.

And to increase the chance that conspiracy theorists stumble on them, we've put their full videos online at thetruthtruthtruth.com.

And if you're looking to start a conversation with someone, picking 1 of these videos is honestly a pretty good entry point.

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Coronavirus: Conspiracy Theories: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)