Transparency efforts can amplify rather than dispel conspiracism

Evidence

Conspiracism flourishes today in our comparatively open democracy in spite of the regulations that compel a great deal of transparency. Official sources of information that are meant to dispel conspiratorial beliefs end up enhancing them—this happens, for instance, when official sources contain redactions. But for conspiracists, documents released by government agencies or congressional committees are just more evidence of fabrication, hoax, and covers for impending coups. Transparency, the upside-down conspiracist argument goes, is itself a deception. In fact, however, conspiracism is not really a complaint about incomplete openness. It is not a demand for more transparency. — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying, 318

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The insight that official transparency mechanisms feed the very delegitimation they are meant to counter — because redactions and disclosures read as cover-ups to closed minds — is a dense reversal worth sitting with.
• ADDENDUM: Connects obliquely to ‘On Sacrifice’ in how official rituals/documents, meant to stabilize, can be read oppositely by hostile interpreters.
• CANDY: Transparency as itself accused of being a deception is a neat inversion worth a party conversation.
• XREF: connects to: Correcting conspiracy misinformation can backfire and entrench the false belief. — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New…, 119; Exposure-only responses mirror the conspiracism they oppose — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New…, 351; Collaboration so seamless it defies accounting invites conspiratorial explanation — Joseph E. Uscinski and Joseph M. Parent, American Conspiracy Theories, 26 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Transparency can function as a mechanism of control, not liberation #complicates (0.85) — , The Braided Reading EPUB, 1259