Extract from ABC News
By Michael Dulaney and Alex Lollback for Days Like These
It was on their weekly video call that Kasey Edwards first noticed the flat Earth poster in her mother's house.
The poster had quietly replaced an ordinary framed photo in the background. It struck Kasey as odd, but she believed it was harmless.
"Not all families agree on everything. And if Mum wanted to think that the Earth was flat, well then so be it," she said.
A retired teacher, Kasey's mother was an involved parent who called once a week, sometimes more, and tutored her granddaughters in maths over the phone.
Kasey let her mum talk about her theories and occasionally asked probing questions, but otherwise didn't engage.
She didn't know it at the time, but the flat Earth poster was the first sign her mother was drifting away from her friends and family.
"My mum said that she felt for the first time in her life that she'd found her tribe of people where she really belonged. It was her coming out moment," Kasey recalled.
Soon, her mother was speaking at a flat Earth conference in London, and socialising with other adherents.
Over the next two years she seemed increasingly unable to talk about anything else — not just flat Earth theory, but chemtrails, 9/11 truth, anti-vaccination, and the "Plandemic".
She began deliberately trying to catch coronavirus to prove it was fake.
For Kasey, who is a journalist, the discussions became personal when her mother alleged that she was ordered what to write, and that her husband, an academic, was part of a global conspiracy.
To Kasey's shock, her mother began arguing the Holocaust never happened — a conspiracy theory that is banned in Germany, where Kasey's brother lives.
The final straw came when she was peddling anti-vaccination conspiracies while tutoring Kasey's grandchildren. Not wanting to distress her children, Kasey began to pull back.
"My girls will say things like, 'We haven't spoken to granny for a while.'
"I feel like there's a stake in my heart at that moment."
How to talk to a flat-earther
With the rise of QAnon and the spread of misinformation about the pandemic, many people this year have had the bewildering and distressing experience of watching a loved one "fall down the rabbit hole".
But for those most affected it can be difficult to know how to respond, or even where to turn for help.
"I would [once] look at these people … and think they were contemptible, reprehensible idiots," Kasey said.
"And then I saw my mum become a conspiracy theorist and I was like, well, this is someone that I love, and this is someone who is not stupid."
For friends and family, a starting point is to recognise that people hold beliefs for good reasons, according to Australian Psychological Society president Tamara Cavenett.
Conversations are best structured around gentle enquiries about how these beliefs formed and attempts to understand each other.
"[It's] not to necessarily try to change the belief outright, but introduce little pieces of doubt," Ms Cavenett said.
Confronting people too directly runs the risk of expecting them to admit their entire worldview is wrong and having them shut down the conversation, she said.
We've seen this year how some COVID-deniers in the US go so far as to angrily maintain their belief that the virus is fake right up to their dying breath.
One way to handle this is to give someone the "Golden Gate of Retreat": the space to recognise they are wrong without feeling attacked and doubling down.
"I'd also encourage family members to just consider [that] the other person doesn't have to hold all the same beliefs [as you]," Ms Cavenett said.
"It's really about whether or not the belief is interfering with their life."
In defence of conspiracy theories
Part of the appeal of conspiracy theories, Ms Cavenett said, is they offer simple explanations for complex issues, and suggest an element of control in a chaotic world.
Belief in conspiracy itself isn't necessarily misguided — recent history is full of outlandish plots that have later turned out to be true.
To take one example, in the 1950s the CIA tested hallucinogenic drugs on unsuspecting American citizens — then tried to destroy the evidence — and also illegally spied on citizens.
ANU school of philosophy associate professor Colin Klein also noted a survey earlier this year that found a strong belief among black Americans that COVID-19 had been made in a laboratory.
"There's a long history of conspiracy theories [among black Americans] about medical experimentation," he said.
"Part of that is if you look back, you find pretty awful things done to African Americans [by the US government].
"So you can't say: 'Oh, it's unreasonable for African Americans to distrust health institutions.'"
It's also important to remember not all conspiracy believers are as deeply enmeshed as they appear.
When Dr Klein analysed eight years of conspiracy discussions on Reddit up to 2015, he found that most users were engaged just as actively with forums about sport, movies and cat videos as they were about fake moon landings or 9/11 being an inside job.
In other words, the conspiracy theories were just one interest among many.
And contrary to the "tinfoil hat" stereotype, Dr Klein said users on conspiracy forums actively sought out facts and research.
"What jumps out at me is that by far the most they talk about is evidence and sources. Conspiracy theorists are really quite obsessed with things philosophers say people should be thinking about," he said.
Journey down the rabbit hole
Conspiracy beliefs can also be a powerful form of individuation — asserting personal freedom in a world said to be under threat from shadowy external forces.
It's often rooted in fear, and Ms Cavenett said those who feel alienated from family and friends, or are marginalised in some way can be particularly vulnerable.
"As a family member, you might not work directly on the belief, but you can work on that person's wellbeing and their connection to other people," she said.
Kasey said her mother was always interested in alternative beliefs, like astrology, but these sat comfortably with others.
She was a maths teacher who believed in science, education and the collective good and was instrumental in shaping Kasey's politics and worldview.
"That's one of the things that I feel so shocked by now — that anything that has a collective purpose is a conspiracy … it's part of us being controlled."
"It's almost like I don't even know who my mum is anymore."
When her dad left the marriage 15 years ago, Kasey's mum "completely fell apart."
Kasey encouraged her mother to move overseas to escape her "rather dreary" suburban life, and in London she met her now-husband, who she married in 2015.
Although he had some strange beliefs, Kasey was happy that they shared their eccentricities.
But it wasn't until COVID-19 emerged that her mother became fixated on conspiracies.
"Part of this is … that she is lonely and bored [in lockdown] … and she's scared," Kasey said.
Kasey noticed that as her mother's beliefs began to shift, she slowly became isolated from her former life.
"I don't know of any [old] friends that are left," she said.
Pulling someone back from the brink at this stage often needs professional help, and can be beyond the capacity of one individual.
From conspiracies to radicalisation
There's growing concern among those who work to counter online extremism that the COVID-19 pandemic and political polarisation has acted as a "lightning rod" for the spread of misinformation in 2020.
In the past few years, organisations that work to counter violent extremists — known as CVE to insiders — have begun to explicitly focus on conspiracy theories.
"The link is harm," Moonshot CVE manager Clark Hogan-Taylor said of how these two fields are related.
Initially, Moonshot CVE's focus was on jihadists and the far-right, but it has now reframed to preventing online harm in general, particularly from anti-vaccination, coronavirus conspiracies or QAnon.
"It's important to say that anti-vaxxers are not violent extremists, but they do increase the chance of real-world harm against other people," Mr Hogan-Taylor said.
Jacob Davey, who researches the far-right and hate crimes for the London-based Institute for Strategic Dialogue, sees conspiracy theories playing a role in the degradation of key institutions — government, health care, the media — and, in certain cases, even undermining trust in democracy itself.
Along with misinformation spread by state actors and those with authoritarian tendencies, Mr Davey said parts of the traditional media are increasingly "laundering" conspiracy theories to give them legitimacy.
At the same time, social media has created a greater possibility of casual engagement, and an ease of finding likeminded groups of people.
"Even if some facets of this community seem quite benign, they could be a pathway into more hateful, more extremist worldviews."
Countering the pull of the rabbit hole
One of Moonshot CVE's core activities is placing ads with tech companies like Google and Facebook that divert people at risk of being radicalised.
These ads might, for example, display in the results for high-risk search terms for the QAnon conspiracy — that is, search terms that go beyond a casual interest or curiosity.
The ad might provide a link to a Reddit thread with former QAnon adherents sharing stories of how and why they left.
The idea is to use the power of internet searches to offer an alternative message and create what Mr Hogan-Taylor calls "friction" between an intention and a harmful behaviour.
Like any online advertisement, it only presents something that users can choose to click on.
"We're trying to counteract the pull of the rabbit hole … the way the recommendation algorithm will pull you very rapidly from mainstream content to extremist content," he said.
One of the risks, Mr Hogan-Taylor acknowledges, is these being perceived as part of another conspiracy, alienating the paranoid even further.
Beyond these countermeasures, he said he sees a greater need for media literacy and "the slow regular provision of trustworthy reliable sources".
The ISD's Jacob Davey also sees a greater role for digital literacy and digital citizenship being taught not just in classrooms, but also to adults.
"I think there is a very pressing need for ways in which you can create curriculums for adults, which can help build those critical thinking skills and help them understand and navigate the social media ecosystem," he said.
A civil society response
An elephant in the room is to what extent the profit model of tech giants like Facebook and Google are contributing to radicalisation.
Collectively, the two companies control some 60 per cent of online revenue, and Mr Davey said the pull towards extreme content was an "intrinsic" part of monetising attention.
"It's in their interests to keep people on their platforms … [and] keep people clicking through content," he said.
"These platforms [are] almost inherently skewed to facilitate serving up extremist material to people, because it's engaging, it's attractive and because people want to see more of it."
Mr Davey pointed to leaked internal memos published by the Wall Street Journal in May that revealed top executives at Facebook shut down efforts to make the site less divisive.
Internal research revealed Facebook's algorithms were responsible for the growth of extremist pages.
Facebook's representatives have repeatedly claimed over the years that they take the spread of harmful content seriously.
Mr Davey said the algorithm is so powerful he uses it to support some of his research.
"So I'm looking at the far right in Australia at the moment," he said.
"One of the tools I can use to find out what that looks like is by liking some of these pages that Facebook recommends to me."
Inquiries over the past two years have looked critically at the activities of the tech giants in the US, Australia and the UK.
In October, Facebook and YouTube tightened their moderation rules to crack down on QAnon content. YouTube, however, stopped short of an outright ban.
Moonshot CVE's Clark Hogan-Taylor hopes the social media giants are moving towards operating like huge public spaces.
"I think the direction of travel is right. It's way too slow, but it's right," he said.
"[And we'll ask] 'what the hell were we thinking allowing recommendation algorithms to bombard people with this stuff?'"
Mr Davey said reversing extremism needed long-term investment on the scale of several decades.
Although almost everyone is touched by online manipulation in one form or another, only a tiny part of society has so far been involved in confronting it.
"One intervention or one project or one program here is not going to be enough to reverse these trends. We need a whole of society response," he said.
'I will get my mum back'
For Kasey, repeated interventions and conversations with her mother have not been enough. The two all but ceased contact earlier this year.
Kasey wrote an article for the Sydney Morning Herald where she shared her story, and was overwhelmed with the responses from others who had lost someone dear to them.
"We need a more nuanced way of regarding conspiracy theorists," she said.
"That these people behind the conspiracy theories are people that we love and that something has happened to them and that there's a real tragedy here, not just for them, but also for all the people who love them, whose relationships with them have been fundamentally changed because of it."
As the world waits for a breakthrough in the pandemic, Kasey is holding on to her own far-fetched belief.
"My only hope is that when the vaccine frees us from coronavirus, it will also free us from the worst of the conspiracy theories and I will get my mum back. That's my hope," she said.
"Look, I think it's unlikely, but I have to think like that because the alternative is unbearable."
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