By definition, a conspiracy is “a secret plan made by two or more people to do something that is harmful or illegal,”[1] so a conspiracy theory is the belief that various and sundry events or forces in society are the result of such a secret plan. For example, the idea that a vaccine might contain a microchip[2] is a conspiracy theory, because it is the belief that some group of powerful people has secretly and maliciously plotted harm.
Conspiracy theories have never really appealed to me, for two reasons. The first is that I just do not believe humanity to be competent enough to keep such deep and dark secrets. Bureaucracy, be definition, requires a lot of people to be involved, and I have never seen a secret well-kept by more than one person. Second, I struggle to believe that there are people out there actively trying to do evil for its own sake. Aristotelian and Thomistic philosophy are very clear that the will always pursues what it believes to be good, so even when someone does something objectively evil, they always do it because they are somehow convinced that it is a good. A human being can never truly will evil, they can only will a false good.
That said, even though I do not believe in conspiracy theories, I definitely believe in corruption. Humanity is marked by sin, so we should expect that large organizations, such as the government, the Church, or major corporations will occasionally act sinfully, as the sum total of all of the decisions of all of their members are as likely to be marked by the sinful tendencies of these members as by their graced tendencies. (Though we hope and pray that this is less true of the Church, who is the primordial sacrament and source of grace.) When we talk, for example, about systematic oppression of minority groups, we are moving beyond individual choices by individual people to the fact that sinful tendencies have been multiplied over a large number of people, causing a sinful way of thinking to infect an entire organization.
It was with this mindset that I watched with rapt attention the testimony of Frances Haugen (Olin ’06!) before the U.S. Senate regarding the problems with Facebook. What was so compelling to me about her testimony is that she did not ever say that individual actors at Facebook were evil puppet masters (this would be conspiracy thinking); instead, she indicated that the overall culture at the company was driven by problematic values, and that these value decisions had caused the problems she was describing. Specifically, she said that the highest value at Facebook was engagement, itself a neutral value that makes sense for Facebook to promote. But by pushing engagement above all else without balancing it with other values, Facebook unwittingly trained its people and its algorithms to favor and protect posts that made people angry, upset, and even ashamed, as these emotions drive engagement more than happy emotions seem to. Ms. Haugen was very clear that she was not asking for censorship of any viewpoints, as this is problematic itself, but that the government needed to involve itself to put a check on Facebook’s corporate values, to make sure values that favored democracy and societal cohesion were also present in the company’s decision-making structure.
Following that testimony, I am now trying even harder to get my news only from sources that rely primarily on subscribers. Facebook is not alone in valuing engagement – many online news organizations now evaluate what stories to publish and how to phrase the headline by number of clicks on their website, because advertisers evaluate the value of ad space based on clicks-per-page. If I am relying on news organizations that choose their stories based on engagement, I am setting myself up for headlines that spark division and anger. Instead, organizations like traditional newspapers which still require a subscription are driven by a different motive – not engagement as much as overall value. If they provide an overall value, rather than sensationalism, they will attract more subscribers, giving them a motive to be balanced and accurate, rather than angry and hyperbolic. This does not mean they may not be biased in some key ways (see, for example, this discussion of “Kellerism”), but it does mean that they are more likely to choose their values based on principle, rather than page views. I currently have a subscription to the Bellingham Herald, the Seattle Times, and the Pillar. I am now trying to move away from Catholic News Agency (which is free and relies on page-views) and am currently looking for a daily Catholic news site that relies on subscriptions (I have not been thrilled with the Catholic Herald in the past, but I may go back). I am also looking for a national paper (I am considering the WSJ or the Washington Post).
It may be helpful to remember that nothing is free. If you do not have to pay for a service like Facebook with money, then you are paying in some other way, with information or time or attention. If a company or organization is not transparent about its motives or profit model, we would do well to be skeptical of it, because it is important to understand the overarching values that drive the content that we consume and the products that we use.
[1] Conspiracy | Definition of Conspiracy by Merriam-Webster
[2] a purposefully outlandish idea I am using a strawman
Fr. Moore 