Repetition substitutes for evidence as validation in new conspiracism

Evidence

What validates the new conspiracism is not evidence but repetition. When Trump tweeted the accusation that President Barack Obama had ordered the FBI to tap his phones in October before the 2016 election, no evidence of the charge was forthcoming. What mattered was not evidence but the number of retweets the president’s post would enjoy: the more retweets, the more credible the charge. Forwarding, reposting, retweeting, and “liking”: these are how doubts are instilled and accusations are validated in the new media. The new conspiracism—all accusation, no evidence—substitutes social validation for scientific validation: if a lot of people are saying it, to use Trump’s signature phrase, then it is true enough. — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying, 15

The result is not unlike the variant accounts of urban legends that circulate by word of mouth. Unlike oral versions, however, all of the variants may in principle be simultaneously accessible to the Web surfer, who may then be tempted to judge the credibility of a story by the number of times it is told. Here repetition substitutes for direct evidence as a way of determining veracity. The dynamics of rumor provides a helpful analogy, for it is in the nature of rumors to appear precisely in those situations in which normal means of determining reliability are not available, so the potential consumer of rumors may end up determining truth on the basis of how widely a particular one circulates. This gives to rumors—and, by extension, to Internet conspiracy accounts—a selfvalidating quality. The more a story is told, and the more often people hear it, the more likely they are to believe it. — Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy, 119

Consider this exchange between the president and conservative news anchor Bill O’Reilly. Asked whether there is any validity to reports that Trump is unable to back up his claim that three million illegal alien votes cost him the popular vote, the president replied by invoking the only source of validation that mattered: “Many people have come out and said I’m right.” — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying, 261

Categorization

• XREF: Talks to Cialdini-style social proof and to ‘information cascade’ mechanisms from Milgrom’s trade literature. — connects to: New conspiracism abandons evidence while classic conspiracism theorizes it; Unfathomable accusations delight by disorienting their targets — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New…, 94; Bare-assertion conspiracism demands no errant facts to explain — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New…, 63 (+14 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: A dense explanatory chain — why the Internet amplifies conspiracy belief not through censorship freedom but through repetition-as-validation — that resists paraphrase and reframes platform-era misinformation logic. Written pre-social-media, it anticipates virality mechanics.
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New…, 15; Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic…, 119; Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New…, 261

Broader Connections

• Repeating a false claim to debunk it increases its plausibility #exemplifies (0.95) — Holm Gero Hümmler, Ulrike Schiesser, Fact and Prejudice, 164
• Repeated stereotypes create interpretive frames that filter out disconfirming evidence #exemplifies (0.90) — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 94
• Stereotype repetition does not confirm stereotype truth, but frames how future evidence is read #expands (0.90) — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 94
• Initial stereotypes bias perception of identical evidence to confirm themselves #exemplifies (0.85) — John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, Laurie A. Rudman, On the Nature of Prejudice, 1175