Teenagers today are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories, and that is a very bad thing indeed. This was the unmistakeable message conveyed by a story in the Times yesterday. Citing a report published by the Commission into Countering Online Conspiracies in Schools, it related how ‘conspiracy theories are rife in classrooms’. Young people, we’re told, are more inclined to trust social media influencers than the government when it came to news sources and forming their views of the world. Teachers ‘need urgent support’ to prevent children ‘falling down rabbit holes online’ and succumbing to ‘misinformation’ they discover therein.
There is nothing novel in teenagers avoiding mainstream news sources
Of course it’s worrying to discover that a greater proportion of 11 to 18-year-olds distrust information from the government (35 per cent) than they do influencers (29 per cent), or that sixty-five per cent see no harm in spreading the theory that humans never landed on the moon. It’s always concerning to read about the baleful and undiminished influence Andrew Tate has on young boys.
But the story, and the report behind it, is based on two fallacies. The first is that an aversion to conventional news sources is a fresh development among adolescents, and that a preference instead for sensational stories is a new and dangerous consequence of social media. The second fallacy is that challenging received wisdom is inherently unwise and perilous.
There is nothing novel in teenagers avoiding mainstream news sources. This was the norm even before the dawn of the internet. Children and teenagers as a rule have seldom listened to spoken-word radio – the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 scarcely ever – or read serious newspapers. Even those newspapers or supplements aimed at children that were launched in the late-1980s and early-1990s, such as the Indy and Young Telegraph, came and went. Children have rarely watched the BBC Six O’Clock News willingly. Like most of my contemporaries, the only news bulletin I tuned into was John Craven’s Newsround, not least because it was brief, simple and often before Grange Hill.
Instead, youngsters have invariably preferred the fantastic, otherworldly and unlikely. While at school in West London in the late-1980s and early-1990s, when the spectre of football hooliganism was still palpable, my school pals and I constantly heard about a nebulous gang called the ‘Chelsea Smilers’ who used to approach strangers and ask them if they supported Chelsea. If the victim replied ‘no’ the ‘smiler’ produced a credit card/Stanley Knife and sliced the sides of their victims’ mouths into a ‘smile’ shape.
There was no evidence for such horror stories, but that wasn’t the point. People who tell tales or spread salacious conspiracy theories do so for the same reason people have always gossiped: to position themselves in the superior role of the possessor and bearer of important, secret and prohibited knowledge, or to solidify social bonds by spreading anecdotes which are probably untrue, but remain nonetheless outlandish and entertaining.
The news this week that pupils ‘saw no harm…about telling people that a small and secretive group runs many world institutions’ is utterly unremarkable from an anthropological and historical perspective: humans have always sought to present themselves as superior to their peers, and humans have always liked telling stories.
As adults, most of us grow out of believing and disseminating half-truths and tall tales. Few regurgitate the made-up story, also common in my day, that Marlboro was run by neo-Nazis because if you turned the cigarette packet upside down, the logo plausibly read ‘oroblejew’. All routine, popular, innocent, fleeting nonsense. Such is the norm for adolescents.
Even if exotic tales and alternative narratives are often harmless nonsense, we should laud the impulse and courage to dare to think differently and challenge often complacent and ossified orthodoxies. A belief in a conspiracy theory often shows a curious, probing mind, and not all beliefs filed under this category warrant the dismissive label. Thirty-five per cent of respondents were ‘happy to tell people that young men are being deliberately excluded by society’. Perhaps they are ‘happy to’ do so because it’s true, considering DEI policies used by private and public bodies for years used to effectively discriminate against men, or the underachievement of boys in state school that’s resulted from their boyish needs being consciously dismissed, ignored or pathologised.
Elsewhere, twenty-five per cent of pupils say there are deliberate efforts in the UK to replace native-born people with immigrants. While there is no evidence that there is a ‘deliberate’ policy, this outlook does perhaps reflect something about the surge in migration levels in recent years.
An obsession with the ‘misinformation’ of the masses is often the hallmark of an authoritarian society that is intolerant of dissenting views and perspectives. ‘Conspiracy theories’ are indeed usually risible. But often children will tell the actual truth because the adults are too fearful to do so.
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