Flat Earth beliefs persist in groups with thousands of engaged online followers
Evidence
Sophie is stunned, horrified and captivated at the same time. Like a bystander who can’t tear her gaze away from a particularly bloody accident, she clicks through more and more new images, articles and videos and the comments on them for over an hour. The arguments put forward as to why the earth cannot be a sphere seem almost touchingly naive to Sophie: it looks flat from the ground, so it is flat. Depictions of the southern hemisphere show people standing on their heads, asking why they don’t fall off the earth. The page has 4000 fans, and judging by the unanimity of the comments, apparently most of them actually believe in a flat Earth. After a brief search, Sophie comes across half a dozen other pages and discussion groups of similar content, all with thousands of followers. Finally, she can’t hold back any longer, trying in her own comments to at least point out the most absurd errors in thinking. After 5 min, other readers ridicule her as a sleep sheep. After 10 min, she can no longer comment on the site: One of the administrators has blocked her. — Holm Gero Hümmler, Ulrike Schiesser, Fact and Prejudice, 51
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the psychology of conspiracy-belief communities and motivated reasoning in other chapters on disbelief and cognitive bias.