Darragh Worland:

Turning to YouTube or an online forum for medical advice can lead to a dark place.

Derek Beres:

Hashtags just exploit cognitive biases. So you go from someone who falsified vaccine autism research to alien content that there are aliens in the deep state in the government very quickly, and it happens.

Darragh Worland:

That’s author and podcaster, Derek Beres, co-author of the book Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat and co-host of the podcast Conspirituality. And I’m Darragh Worland, your host for Is That a Fact? Beres is here to talk about the hidden dangers of health mis- and disinformation.

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Darragh Worland:

Thanks so much for joining me today, Derek.

Derek Beres:

Thank you for having me.

Darragh Worland:

So, first, would you please define what we’re referring to when we talk about health and wellness mis- and disinformation?

Derek Beres:

Well, I think it makes sense first to tease apart misinformation and disinformation. Generally, the way that I understand it, misinformation is the spreading of false, sometimes egregious information. Maybe you see a headline and you don’t read the story, you don’t have the context and you just happen to share it. A lot of people fall victim to misinformation. I have in the past. It’s not that uncommon. Disinformation is the willful spreading of false information, usually with an agenda. It is often propagandistic. And so I think it’s important to sort of bucket that separately. When it comes to health and wellness, I’ll keep that framework and say if you’re someone who might be skeptical of the medical system, the healthcare system in America where we are, you might share a headline you see about vaccine misinformation, not really looking into the context, not understanding the study or the research paper that it comes from, but just sharing it to your network.

While there are people specifically in the field that we cover on Conspirituality who willfully either create or spread misinformation because maybe they’re a doctor who offers services and they want some people not to get the vaccine so they’ll come and see them on their telehealth service or so that they can sell them some unregulated and not studied supplements because they would rather have people buying that than having faith in the medical system. So specifically with health and wellness, we did start because of the anti-vax movement as a podcast, but it really spreads its tentacles into many different directions.

Darragh Worland:

So you just used this term that I would love for you to define for our audience, ‘conspirituality.’ Can you define that for us?

Derek Beres:

It was an academic term that was first coined in 2011. It was the name – or is the name – of a Vancouver, Canada based rap group from 2008, but that was just a term that he created.

In 2011, two researchers, David Voas and Charlotte Ward, wrote an academic paper and they coined the term – Charlotte Ward, specifically – ‘conspirituality,’ which is generally the left-leaning predominantly female new age and wellness sort of mindset and community and where it merges with the right wing, predominantly male conspiratorial thinking. Her thesis was that, at times, especially during times of cultural or social distress, these two communities merge and share a lot of ideas and that’s exactly what we saw during the pandemic. There’s been a lot of pontification about what the term means since then. It turns out that Charlotte Ward, herself, was writing in promotion of the idea because she, herself, is a conspiracy theorist. We write about this in our book, we’ve covered it in episodes before. But we chose the term to look at as a field of study because the three of us co-hosts come from the health and wellness fields.

Darragh Worland:

There’s been health and wellness grifters, these proverbial sort of snake oil salesmen forever, as long as people have been searching for cures and looking for ways to improve their health. But social media obviously has provided a much bigger platform for these profiteers. What are some of the ways social media really amplifies this health and wellness misinformation and disinformation?

Derek Beres:

That’s a very big question and it could, it could consume multiple episodes to really break down. But you are right. I was just, before getting on this call, I was working on a short video talking about mesmerism because that mesmerism was the first blinded study conducted in the late 18th century to disprove this idea that there’s a vital force that goes through all of … all of nature basically. And you can heal people with energy like reiki and things like that. So it has been going on. The New York Times when it was first founded in the mid-19th century, was often talking about quack doctors. What you didn’t have back then, what you do have now is the ability to rapidly spread misinformation. So one of the unfortunate … I’ve been in journalism for 30 years now, one of the unfortunate trends that you see is that people read the headline and then immediately share without reading the story.

And as a writer, that’s always kind of infuriating, but it just spread so rapidly through these networks. And then you have something which was identified early in the pandemic called Pastel QAnon, which is this affect that wellness influencers had been using for years. They called it these, these pastel colors, these sort of very framed shots of someone in a yoga pose or drinking [a] cup of tea. And they create this brand for themselves. And maybe you like some of the things about health, these influencers that are saying. But then all of a sudden in the stories, you start seeing these hashtags and these buzzwords around, again, anti-vax ideologies. That is where the pipeline happens, where people get indoctrinated very quickly because you think, ‘oh well I like what this person said here. They must be telling the truth over here.’ And that’s what social media has really allowed for the proliferation of these charismatic influencers to spread themselves more broadly than ever. Social media allowed some of these people to have hundreds of thousands or millions of followers, and then they spread that to their followers. And so that’s why there’s so much confusion around so many of the topics that we cover right now.

Darragh Worland:

Let’s talk a little bit about the algorithms. What role do these social media and search engine algorithms play in amplification? How can that kind of go wrong?

Derek Beres:

I recently had Tobias Rose-Stockwell, who is a media researcher, has a new book called Outrage Machine on to specifically talk about that. And he spent a lot of time looking into how those network effects happen. And I see it all the time because I pay for a YouTube subscription because I can’t stand ads and I have things that I love to watch, but then I also need to do research all the time. And YouTube is one of the biggest platforms where misinformation spreads. So even, myself, just looking up researchers, I notice how quickly QAnon and anti-vax content starts getting fed to me because a lot of times individuals like to think where unique. But that’s the thing about having giant data sets is that if you like this, there’s a good chance you’re going to like this and advertisers and marketers know this. And so hashtags just exploit these cognitive biases and the ways that we operate as humans in ways in much faster and much better than we can ever comprehend. So if you start watching something about Andrew Wakefield, David Icke isn’t that far away. So you go from someone who falsified vaccine autism research to alien content, that there are aliens in the deep state in the government, very quickly and it happens. And then you have platforms like Gaia that specifically broker in that because they’ve realized that that certain population likes this type of alcohol propaganda, you can say information, content, whatever. And they specifically create and feed that to their audiences.

Darragh Worland:

So what you’re saying is people who ultimately are becoming radicalized in the health space can become radicalized in the conspiracy realm overall. So you’re looking for health and wellness information on YouTube and you may become sort of increasingly funneled into increasingly radical viewpoints. And then before you know it, those viewpoints are crossing the barrier from health and wellness into, like you said, alien content. And then sort of like all bets are off.

Derek Beres:

Very often. It depends on the individual, but yes, what you said, there is an indoctrination pipeline that can go all the way into all conspiracies. But what we’ve noticed and what I focus on specifically is how the anti-vax movement, for example, again, when you start watching that content will start to bring you a general distrust of the entire medical system. And then it goes from the COVID vaccine to not getting any vaccinations. We’ve seen in America for two straight years, preschooler vaccination rates have dropped one percentage point each year. We see that people will stop going to their primary care doctor more, they’ll start having a general distrust and they’ll start buying more and more supplements, which again are completely unregulated and they’re unstudied. And that that health pipeline going from distrust of pharmaceutical and doctors into this alternate field of medicine … that is extremely common. You won’t always get to the aliens, but you’ll often get to the supplements.

Darragh Worland:

Who is most vulnerable to health and wellness misinformation and disinformation, in particular?

Derek Beres:

I would say two categories of people. And I’ll, I’ll start with one that I put myself in because I had worked in that field and I also grew up overweight. So I grew up having been bullied my entire life when I was younger. I was very prime for the demographic of eating disorders, which I did have. I suffered from Orthorexia for about 15 years of my life. I was very much caught up in those patterns of finding the exact perfect food, working out in the way that would bring me this and that. And so someone like me is very primed, who wants to optimize and stay in good shape. And you get this … the one thing about these algorithms and the social media content you’re fed is this constant fever pitch. No, this workout is better. No, no, you need this one, this one, and every time the promises have to get more and more extreme in order to keep the attention-capture focused on that person. So people who just wanna stay healthy but maybe want a little better body, they want to eat a little bit better, are primed to get sucked into this as I was 15 years ago.

The second category that I think is most prominent are people who’ve been hurt by the medical industry, and that is unfortunate. There are vaccine injured people, there are people who have had bad operations or unnecessary surgeries. You look at stents for from cardiologists, and it comes out years later that a lot of them were unnecessary because cardiology labs were trying to maximize profits. And that really sucks and that harms a lot of people. And so if you’re harmed by someone in such a way and you’ve realized you’ve been the victim of a grift on the for-profit medical side, you’re going to not be looking at that system for solutions anymore. So where else are you gonna turn? Of course you’re going to go into the health and wellness spaces. So I understand why a lot of people get sucked into a lot of this misinformation. It’s hard to suss out sometimes.

Darragh Worland:

Let’s talk about the financial incentives for the profiteers. So, for instance, Joe Rogan and Alex Jones have both made millions, maybe even hundreds of millions, from products they’ve each sold on their shows or thanks to their shows’ popularities. How safe are these products and are they regulated?

Derek Beres:

I err on the side of a lot of the researchers that I’ve talked to about supplements is in general you are just paying for expensive urine because that’s what your body does to vitamins and minerals that it doesn’t need in excess. You’re probably just wasting money for things that you don’t need. Now, targeted supplementation, supplementation has a meaning and it means your body is specifically lacking something and then you supplement with it. That’s totally fine. If someone isn’t getting something and they talk to a doctor and they’re like ‘Hey, you’re low on this’ then that makes sense. I take supplements. I have suffered from lifelong canker sores, they’re terrible. And I take a B12 and a lysine and it works for me. And the thing about it is it doesn’t actually clinically work for everyone, but I tried it, it works. No problem.

Multivitamins, there’s a case that some people should be taking them, that’s fine. But the pipeline that we really cover are the people who say, ‘don’t trust big pharma. Buy this supplement instead.’ And so you have someone like Mikki Willis who created the pseudo-documentary Plandemic. He now has three versions of that film out. He also has Rebel Lion, which is a supplements company. I’ve broken down everything in it on the show before. None of what he’s saying is proven. His marketing emails will say ‘there’s an uptick in malaria, watch out for Bill Gates. Oh, buy my supplement.’ There’s no logical thing connecting all those things. But there’s this sort of conspiratorial mindset that does connect it. And so at the extreme end, you will get harmed by taking too much of a vitamin and mineral. I think sometimes people forget that whatever product you’re buying is a chemical and it’s going to have a chemical reaction inside of your body. A lot of pharmaceuticals are based on natural products. Someone died for drinking too much water too quickly because she felt dehydrated and that … it’s very rare. But all, all chemistry can have adverse effects.

Darragh Worland:

So, at best, you’re pissing away your money and at worst you’re potentially putting your life at risk.

Derek Beres:

I would say the bigger risk is you think that the supplements are keeping you healthy. So you don’t see a doctor when you have your problems, when you have any problems. Recently, a former guest on our podcast – a cardiologist named Danielle Lardo, who’s awesome – she posted on Twitter that she was seeing a patient who was near heart failure and needed surgery immediately. And that patient says, ‘I need to talk and get clearance from my naturopath first.’ And her naturopath, or that person’s naturopath, I don’t know if it was a man or woman, had them on oregano oil instead of actual medications that they needed. And once I posted about that, I had a few doctors reach out to me saying they’ve seen the same thing in their own practice. So that to me is much more dangerous than an adverse effect of a supplement because so many of the beneficial effects of modern medicine are invisible to us now. At the turn of the 20th century, you had antibiotics, you had the widespread dissemination of vaccines, you had public health measures like handwashing and better sanitary measures. All of these things have made our lives so much better. We first hit 1 billion people in the 1880s on this planet. We are now at 8 billion people. After hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, it took 150 to get to an 8x population increase. Now we can argue whether or not it’s a good thing for the planet and sustainability, that’s a separate conversation, but that’s almost predominantly due to public health measures and better medical interventions. And so because it’s now invisible to us in so many ways, we take it for granted.

Darragh Worland:

Going back to Jones and Rogan, being the charismatic people that they are, you know, we often see a lot of health mis- and disinformation revolving around these charismatic personalities. You mentioned that earlier. What are some of the common themes or ways that these health and wellness influencers mislead their followers? What should people look out for?

Derek Beres:

I would say from a health perspective, two specific things that are combined. First is ambiguity. So they will create a general fear and paranoia around medicine in general. I was just working on a video before we got on about mesmerism, but it ultimately leads to the fact that doctors, nurses, researchers, they’re just as frustrated about our for-profit medical system. The sort of wrestling match between hospitals and insurance companies is epic and it’s generations long at this point. But what the influencers do is they just kind of lump all of them together as if they’re all working together in cahoots to keep you sick. And that is the first red flag. So anytime that you see someone trying to talk about the system in general, if they’re not teasing out the research and the people working within it, that’s the first red flag, which leads to the sales pitch, which is the second red flag.

If they’re saying that their product or service is definitely going to cure you where the other system has failed, that’s the second red flag. And sometimes you’ll see it for very targeted interventions. Like they’ll say this will help with anxiety. So they’ll teach a workshop on anxiety and you know what, maybe their breathing course or their workshop will help you. And that’s kind of not that big of a deal. But a lot of the times I’ll see supplements or biohacking nootropics, things like that, that are marketed to cover a range of issues. And anytime you see that, that’s the biggest red flag to me.

Darragh Worland:

It used to be that everybody used to go to ‘Doctor Google’ for their symptoms, right? And I, I know many of us still do that, but what I’ve been seeing more and more is people increasingly going to social media platforms for their medical advice, going to forums, groups, asking friends, family acquaintances, even strangers, you know – I’m on mom groups because I’m a mom – and you just see, you know, moms going, ‘hey, my kid has this rash.’ They post a picture of the rash, you know, and they’re like, ‘does any anyone … has anyone’s kid had this before?’ And a lot of moms will … I mean the range of advice, it just runs the gamut. What are the dangers in doing this?

Derek Beres:

I’ll give an example that I was just talking to someone about last week. A friend of mine was talking about being in a text chain with a group of women who are premenopausal. So they’re all in their forties at this point and they all see it coming. So they wanted to discuss some of what to do, what to go through. And immediately it turned into homeopathy. And it pointed back to a Christian Northrop, who’s someone we cover off often on this, who is an kind of an extreme example of conspirituality. And the person I was talking to … I said, ‘Hey, why don’t you share Jen Gunter, who is a … who’s a much better resource for this information.’ Like don’t, don’t, don’t try to combat it. Just say, ‘oh, you know what? I was reading this book and this seems to be good because Jen will take down all of what my friend had saw on that chain so far.’

But immediately the reflex response was acupuncture and homeopathy. Now this is not something that I have a lot of knowledge in. Whenever I have questions, I would turn to someone like a Jen Gunter. If I wanted to do an episode on menopause specifically, I will look for an expert. But it’s an example of how quickly these small mom groups, text chains, WhatsApp groups – however you’re doing it – all it needs is one person to start going in that direction. And it can very quickly turn. And when I was talking to Tobias Rose-Stockwell, he was talking about the WhatsApp group that at the beginning of the pandemic that he was put in charge of, and when people shared Plandemic, he said, ‘no, no, this is not credible.’ And he broke down all the reasons why. And then they splintered off started their own WhatsApp group called ‘Just Asking Questions,’ so, you see, this happens all the time in these groups.

Darragh Worland:

What I find so interesting is Dr. Northrop that you just mentioned, who you just mentioned, and Dr. Gunter are both medically trained doctors. They’re both OBGYNs. And yet I used to be a big fan of Dr. Northrop’s, but then she sort of started to go into this, you know, conspirituality direction. What I find so interesting though is that they both have credibility and, and it’s dangerous, you know. Dr. Gunther does a great job on social media of debunking mis- and disinformation. I mean, she is out there every single day. This is not a chiropractor spreading misinformation about, you know, gynecology or obstetrics. How does this happen?

Derek Beres:

I would just say that humans are humans and we’re all susceptible to conspiracies and our own cognitive biases. So you look at someone like Northrop, she really hit a mark in the 1990s with her, her main book. She was respected and people are people, and I don’t know the pipeline, she got sucked down, but we’ve seen a number of doctors … you had America’s Healthline, frontline doctors during the pandemic, come out. And one common theme though is that they will use their credentials to say ‘I know the system from the inside out. I know it’s corrupt, and here, this is better for you’ because they’re trained. And it could be that they’re an opportunist or a grifter, or it could have been that they really believe it. Intentionality is almost impossible to prove unless someone straight up tells you. And that’s something on the podcast, we always … we will express possible reasons, but we always are … you don’t really ever know why someone goes that path. But I do know that they almost always use their credentials to their advantage of trying to say like, ‘I was in the system and I was able to escape it. And here’s why you should never go to that system.’

Darragh Worland:

Is it fair to say that looking at somebody’s credentials when you’re considering the source of information is not necessarily the best way to evaluate the credibility of the information?

Derek Beres:

I think you should always start there. I do actually think that that’s important. So you have someone like a Joe Dispenza, who is only trained medically as a chiropractor but he says he is a neuroscientist and he talks about it all the time. … We did a deep dive on him and we could find no actual credible training in academia and neuroscience, but he will use that. So that’s one way. But, but yeah, you look at, again, going back to Northrup, you look and you see she actually has their credentials. So the next thing to do is to look at the claim and then go to the field and find out what other people in the field are saying because that’s … where you’re gonna find at Jen Gunther, right? And then you’re gonna, then you’re gonna be like, okay, maybe this isn’t really holding water, because this doesn’t seem to be what the field is saying.

And that’s one of the really important aspects of modern medicine and peer-reviewed research. There’s a lot of problems with the replication crisis and peer review in general, and I understand that. But when you can have a larger data set of experts in a field to look at and weigh that out and assess that is going to be beneficial, the problem, and I’m sure you know in your organization, is getting people to take that step past the tweet or the post or the headline and then actually start applying those critical thinking and media literacy skills to be able to assess what they’re being told.

Darragh Worland:

I really want to talk about reporting on nutritional studies because this is something that I saw as a journalist. You know, we’d get a study that was, you know, paid for by some beer association or something on the nutritional value of beer or something. Or you know, such as whether drinking coffee will lower your risk of cardiovascular disease. And this kind of information is changing on a regular basis. I think we can all agree that health and wellness reporting can fall short often in accurately conveying the results of studies very hard to convey nuance of a full scale study in a short article. What can journalists do to better ensure their audiences are getting credible information from these studies?

Derek Beres:

I’ll give an example. I was reading Popular Science the other day because I had done a brief recently on kombucha and [George Thomas] Dave’s, which is the biggest company. He just endured a labor lawsuit, which he lost, and so he presents himself as love and light. Turns out that he was abusing his workers, he has to pay a half a million dollars, which is a good thing. But in that episode, I look at some of the health claims of kombucha and they’ve long been mixed. Could they help gut health? It’s possible. Could they cure cancer? Probably not, but that was on his bottles for a long time. So that, that’s a big red flag. But after I published an episode, I found, I found this popular science article about kombucha, and the headline was ‘kombucha may help diabetics with insulin levels or blood sugar levels.’ And it was actually well done because when I read it, the reporter had pointed out that the original dataset was 12 people, but it only concluded with seven people and that the people involved were the control for themselves. Now, those are all very important factors, and the article concluded this is a good first step. We should look further into that, which is what a good pilot study will do. The headline itself did not say ‘kombucha helps regulate blood levels.’ ‘May’ was the third word, I believe, or second word in it. So that’s a good thing. But what’s hard about that in a headline culture is that people will see it, not read it, not understand why seven people isn’t a credible data set, not understand what a pilot study is, and then they may be like, ‘oh, I’m diabetic, I’m going to turn to this.’ And I think one of the hardest things that all of us in this field have to grapple with is that the reader has some responsibility in this as well. I don’t think that was as much the case when I started in the 1990s when I worked in newspapers in New Jersey because you had an editorial board, you had a headline writer, you had a whole bunch of guardrails in your reporting before you went to print, and you also offered corrections. That is much rarer in online networks. But now at this point, because everyone can become a news source, not just a consumer, but a creator of news, it just is up to the readers and the consumers as well to actually take those extra steps. I don’t have any answers of how to create that, but I think that’s really important. That’s an example of what I think was a good small article that I think should always be presented.

Darragh Worland:

Is there something the scientific community could better do in conveying the results of their studies?

Derek Beres:

We can take the recent Diet Coke fiasco for an example. So you’re talking about aspartame and you have one agency saying, ‘oh, this could lead to cancer’ and then, ‘but go ahead and keep drinking it.’ Horrible, horrible miscommunication that that’s what the WHO led with on this particular issue because it is true that dose matters. Getting back to my early statements about chemistry, Paracelsus saw this (500 or) 600 years ago, the fact that what kills in large doses can heal in small doses. So if you have to drink 12 Diet Cokes a day for multiple years to get cancer, most people aren’t going to be at that level. But the way it was presented and the way that the media then took it and ran with it, it’s really problematic. And I think that, on that side, the newspapers and the agencies have to stop worrying about attention-capture, and they have to stop worrying about being the first to break a story with a big headline that’s going to get the clicks and with the incentives as they are in media right now, I don’t see a lot of organizations doing that. So that puts the onus back on the consumer of the news, which is really challenging for a lot of people.

Darragh Worland:

When people do have questions about health related topics and they’re looking for credible information, what are the sources that you recommend they seek out?

Derek Beres:

First off, and it’s really challenging, but it depends on the topic. And then you wanna look for the expert in the field on that topic. If you wanna understand vaccines, look for a vaccinologist or an epidemiologist. Look for someone who specifically brokers in those fields. Don’t … not even just an MD, you can start there, but that’s, that’s where you have to go and that’s what makes all of this so challenging. And there are credible news sources. I’ll see people sharing a Michelle Goldberg column in The New York Times as if it’s reporting and it’s not. It’s an op-ed. So even being able to under distinguish and understand the differences between those styles of writing on the same publication is very difficult for people. And they’ll share op-eds as if it’s actual straight reporting, and then when actual straight reporting from a ProPublica comes across, they’ll immediately think, no, that’s compromise. That’s an opinion when it’s actual investigation. And so you’re right with, with the attention-capture and with the just overwhelming amount of information that’s being presented on a daily basis, trying to sort through all that is a herculean task.

Darragh Worland:

Is there anything else that we didn’t cover that, you would like to talk about before we wrap up, Derek?

Derek Beres:

I would say from a broad perspective, and this is something … I’m working on a book on media literacy and science literacy right now. One thing that has really captured my attention is the fact that the idea of unbiased news is a relatively new idea and we’ve never really done it right. And I don’t think we ever will because that’s not our nature, but I think that there are people who are trying to do it. And I think because I see so much in the comment sections and when I get trolled about the experts are wrong, the experts are wrong. And I always think … I’ve never met a human who has gotten everything a hundred percent right. And it’s very easy to overlook our own failures and our own misjudgments and all of these systems that we’re dealing with, including in media and in medicine, are open to fallibility and to human error, and it sucks, but it happens and it’s part of it.

And so when you take into consideration that every news source does potentially start from a place of bias, but that there are actually people who are trying to get to the truth. And if they start a story in one place and the data leads them somewhere else, and then they change the story and the process, that’s a good thing. That’s the type of person you want to follow who can have some humility. That is something I didn’t bring up with that earlier question about red flags for influencers. They very … any of their humility is fake. It always leads back to them as a person and they will never actually admit error. And if they’re admitting error, it usually has to do with, ‘I had trust in the medical system, but now I’ve seen the light and here’s what you need to buy from me,’ which is foe humility. It’s not real. So I just think it’s important to remember that when you’re reading things online, they are starting from humans and that we’re all of us are open to a range of issues, but that people who speak a little more slowly and who will admit they don’t have all the evidence are a lot more trustworthy than people who say they have all the answers.

Darragh Worland:

Thank you very much, Derek. This has been great. You’re so informed on the topic and I think our listeners are going get a lot out of everything you shared with us today and we look forward to your book.

Derek Beres:

It’s very early, my agent has just received it, but thank you and thank you so much for having me and for all the work you do at your organization as well.

Darragh Worland:

Thanks for listening. Is That a Fact? is a production of the News Literacy Project, a non-partisan education nonprofit building a national movement to create a more news literate America. For more go to news lit.org. I’m your host, Darragh Worland. Our producer is Mike Webb, and our theme music is by Aaron Bush. Thanks to our podcast production partner Rivet 360. For more about them, go to rivet360-dot-com.