The harm caused by 5G conspiracy theories

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 Hooo 04 Apr 2020

Maybe I do get a bit too upset about people spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories, but it does cause real harm.

I saw this in the paper today

 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/apr/03/broadband-engineers-thre...

Morons setting fire to telecoms masts and abusing workers. All because they believe the drivel spread on YouTube.

 mutt 04 Apr 2020
In reply to Hooo:

a blessing as I am now not the only one who turns the internet off when my son transgresses.

In reply to Hooo:

Once, the Earth was flat. 

What evidence to repudiated, the spreading?------------ 

pasbury 04 Apr 2020
In reply to Name Changed 34:

Qhuophlten just chat right hand cystic BCG JC.

 balmybaldwin 04 Apr 2020
In reply to Hooo:

My Neighbour, previously "just" a bit of a religious nut has gone full blown looney.

She's a lovely woman, about my age, but has an awful back story including abuse and leaving home at 14. She's done amazingly well for herself, and obviously lent on the church a bit in terms of getting herself back on track. However she feels God did everything, and none of it is her doing. - I can't be doing with that, but having lived next door to each other for 8 years, we get on very well. or did

In the last year, she has grown apart from her best friend, and around christmas started posting anti-vax stuff, talking about chem-trails, the MSM are evil etc, and is now convinced that CV19 is all fake, and a big conspiracy to cover-up for the deliberate crashing of the stock market. This is despite the husband of her friend being in the CCU at royal surrey having tested positive- apparently he's a bit of a "victim"

OP Hooo 05 Apr 2020
In reply to balmybaldwin:

I had to Google MSM. That was fun, I assume you're referring to mainstream media rather than men who have sex with men

What's bizarre is that these people distrust the MSM but they are happy to trust the vast Facebook YouTube corporation that clearly has no scruples when it comes to making money, and obviously has a vested interest in mobile data tech. It's almost as if tbere is an inverse relationship between how reliable a source ​is and how much they trust it.

Post edited at 10:37
 balmybaldwin 05 Apr 2020
In reply to Hooo:

Yes exactly. Senior Doctor having studied viruses for 30+ years, or do you listen to some random who is giving you his "truth"

Removed User 05 Apr 2020
In reply to balmybaldwin:

Ah yes, the big hoax story.

An acquaintance of mine has ascribed to that one. She was locked up for a bit of lie down last year and sent home with instructions to smoke less dope and stop watching shite on YouTube. She immediately started smoking more dope while glued to her computer.

A golden rule of psychiatric care is that one should never reinforce someone's delusions and  of course this shite on the internet is doing exactly that and I expect is having a detrimental effect on the mental health of the vulnerable around the world. I'm all for free speech but I'd be delighted if that sort of shite disappeared without trace.

 deepsoup 05 Apr 2020
In reply to Hooo:

This popped up on another forum I read: youtube.com/watch?v=qWzIh1OOa8Y&

There are a lot of technical types on there, people who work with electronics and most of them thought it was very funny.  I found it really depressing. 

I'm not sure if I'm posting the link here to amuse the folks who will find it amusing or spread the misery around the misanthropes like myself, maybe a bit of both.  Enjoy.

 GWA 05 Apr 2020
In reply to Hooo:

There is a correlation of 1.00 between pseudoscientists spreading these kinds of discredited ideas and their ideas being propagated in books that they are selling. 

Every time I start digging into the background from my own experience there is usually a failed scientific career and/or scandal and a book sale in play................

OP Hooo 05 Apr 2020
In reply to deepsoup:

Holy shit, is he serious? I do find that depressing. People are watching this shite and believing it.

"Only a very very ignorant fool would even pretend that this is some kind of ballast". Only a fool, or a person who has ever looked inside a bog standard switched mode power supply... But if you talk really slowly and confidently lots of fools will believe your bonkers conspiracy theory.

 Dax H 05 Apr 2020
In reply to Hooo:

I would like to say I can't believe anyone would believe that 5G is the cause but there are some properly dum people in this world. 

One I do keep hearing from a lot of people is that China released this on the world so that the could rise to be the dominant economy. 2 different theories on Wuhan, 1 that the government sacrificed the people for their cause and the other is Wuhan is fine and the blockade is so the rest of the world can't see that. 

It's worrying how gullible some people can be. 

 john arran 05 Apr 2020
In reply to Dax H:

> I would like to say I can't believe anyone would believe that 5G is the cause but there are some properly dum people in this world. 

The most worrying part is that some/many of the people taken in by these conspiracy hoaxes are not stupid at all. I know at least a couple of affected people who I would class as above average intelligence and it is baffling how they could be blind to the kind of thinking they probably would apply in other areas of their lives. I think it's genuinely a mental condition, probably not dissimilar to the kind of altered mental state that is in play when intelligent people are sucked into cult movements.

 deepsoup 05 Apr 2020
In reply to Hooo:

> Holy shit, is he serious? I do find that depressing. People are watching this shite and believing it.

He does seem to be, though I couldn't begin to guess how many of the people who watch it believe it.

> "Only a very very ignorant fool would even pretend that this is some kind of ballast".

I think the bit that most got me was just before that (but I'm not going to watch it again to check) - and you can tell how ludicrous that is even if you don't know a capacitor from a cantaloupe.  I hope I'm not misquoting it too badly:

"You can tell they're trying to hide something here because this bit of circuitry is inside a box that has been designed to be impossible to open. <opens the box> And when we look inside..."

 Bacon Butty 05 Apr 2020
In reply to deepsoup:

Why won't Northumbria Police go and help him with his enquiries?!?! 😆😆😆

 mondite 05 Apr 2020
In reply to deepsoup:

 

> "You can tell they're trying to hide something here because this bit of circuitry is inside a box that has been designed to be impossible to open.

So pretty much anything sold today in plastic packing is part of this plot? Including scissors.

 deepsoup 05 Apr 2020
In reply to mondite:

> So pretty much anything sold today in plastic packing is part of this plot? Including scissors.

That's how deep it goes.  WAKE UP SHEEPLE!

OP Hooo 05 Apr 2020
In reply to deepsoup:

I missed that bit. I did skim through, being unwilling to waste 10 whole minutes of my life on it.

In reply to Hooo:

The thing that amazes me the most is that Governments are apparently able to orchestrate these huge conspiracies that would require 100s or 1000s of staff to run and keep them all quiet but at the same time are too incompetent to be able to get the video exposing it removed from youtube. 

 deepsoup 06 Apr 2020
In reply to grumpyoldjanner:

Even more so than the other conspiracies, you would think Google would at least be in on the 5g thing wouldn't you?

Ah..  but it's a clever double-bluff you see?  By allowing numpties to rant about it incoherently, they're actually enhancing the cover up.  Damn these conspirators are devious!

 jkarran 06 Apr 2020
In reply to deepsoup:

> This popped up on another forum I read: youtube.com/watch?v=qWzIh1OOa8Y&

> I'm not sure if I'm posting the link here to amuse the folks who will find it amusing or spread the misery around the misanthropes like myself, maybe a bit of both.  Enjoy.

I presume from the couple of minutes I could hack it's a wind-up but it's genuinely impossible to tell these days. Jewish CIA lizard space lasers and faster than gravity thermite implosions seem a distant happy memory.

 I'm torn. I find it mildly amusing to see the balmy misconceptions laid bare, who doesn't enjoy a little guilty sneer from time to time, but mostly I think you're right, it's just depressing and dangerous. These videos and the algorithms that push them to people in trouble are doing a lot of harm (says the man hooked on endless car/boat/plane/kayak building videos like they're turbo-meth).

jk

 mbh 06 Apr 2020
In reply to john arran:

It is astonishing to me how people can compartmentalise their thinking.

I was once a post-doc in Zuerich where I had two colleagues, both now professors of physics and both, at the time, forging their careers with regular publications in Nature and other high-impact journals and both of them acing ferociously combative seminars that they gave.

They were  also religious, one of them a born-again Christian and the other from the Russian Orthodox church.

One day, at lunch, we got onto the subject of evolution.  It was like another world. The mist descended and they would not countenance any evidenced argument at all, or at least none that I could muster. I have met many people who have argued from a position of faith, but none since who were so clearly willing and able to do more than that, given the right topic.

 deepsoup 06 Apr 2020
In reply to jkarran:

> but it's genuinely impossible to tell these days.

Poe's law?  (I'm pretty sure it's meant to be serious.)

It just occurred to me that I'm not sure now how we're all still here to worry about 5g.  Wasn't 3g supposed to have killed us all by now?

It's a bit like one of those end-times preachers after their apocalypse turned out to be a bit of an anti-climax isn't it.  "Ok guys, I see where I went wrong in the scripture now - it's actually next Thursday.  Same place, same time everyone?"

 Darron 06 Apr 2020
In reply to deepsoup:

He seems to be wearing a 1970’s era Helly Hansen too😊.

 jkarran 06 Apr 2020
In reply to deepsoup:

> Poe's law?  (I'm pretty sure it's meant to be serious.)

I assumed it was a piss take when we got to the weapon's high gain antenna and he skips over all the various funky shaped patches (probably just auto-filled ground planes) and voids to point at a simple dipole, about the most omni-directional radiator imaginable. It seemed too knowingly absurd to be an accident.

As you say though, another one for Poe.

jk

Post edited at 12:18
In reply to Hooo:

Fortunately, the attempts to spread 5G nonsense (including suggestions of links to CV-19) were stomped on by a mass of posters.

But in the light of calls for social media companies to be more responsible, and prevent this nonsense from being propagated, I did wonder if maybe those sort of threads ought to be binned...

 planetmarshall 06 Apr 2020
In reply to john arran:

> The most worrying part is that some/many of the people taken in by these conspiracy hoaxes are not stupid at all. I know at least a couple of affected people who I would class as above average intelligence and it is baffling how they could be blind to the kind of thinking they probably would apply in other areas of their lives. I think it's genuinely a mental condition, probably not dissimilar to the kind of altered mental state that is in play when intelligent people are sucked into cult movements.

The late Kary Mullis, who shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the invention of PCR (widely used to test for COVID-19 amid a billion other things), was also known for his belief that he had been abducted by aliens and that HIV was not the cause of AIDS.

Expertise, even genius, in a particular domain is no guarantee of sloppy thinking in another.

In reply to deepsoup: someone sent me that video a while back and I found it quite bizarre. The clear claim of “genocide on the streets of Sunderland” is so obviously false that (technical issues aside) you know that everything else in the video must be a lie too and yet people still believe it. 
 

At least we know the moon landings definitely happened. 

 DancingOnRock 06 Apr 2020
In reply to Hooo:

Makes video on social media about the equipment distributing the internet being dangerous, to be spread using the Internet, then sets fire to the Internet equipment being used to distribute the video. 
 

Cuckoo. 

Post edited at 14:06
In reply to Hooo:

Somebody I know, it turns out, is into quite an assortment of conspiracy theories including chemtrails, some 5g bollocks, weather control by the military, and some stuff I’d never come across before to do with the Rothschilds, Waterloo, ownership of the City, and the police. He’s otherwise bright and rational, so I find it hard to understand where this all comes from. Could it be a very specific mental illness, drug-fuelled paranoia or what? In fact, could it be caused by fluoride in the water? Seriously, what do people think causes this stuff - they seem to be very sincerely held and unshakeable beliefs. 

OP Hooo 06 Apr 2020
In reply to mbh:

I think religion is a bit more understandable though. Religious people have built their entire reason for living around their beliefs. Challenging those beliefs would mean losing everything that gives their life meaning. Faced with this prospect the religious scientists choose to compartmentalise and put their religion into a separate sphere, one that is exempt from scientific investigation. 

We are all capable of this behavior to some degree. How many of us have been in involved in a relationship that we knew was unhealthy but have continued with it anyway, convincing ourselves that it could be made to work? I know I have. 

What's so odd about the conspiracy theorists is that so often there doesn't seem to be any good reason for it. I was talking to a family member who believed the moon landings had been faked. With a bit of questioning I discovered that he knew almost nothing about it, and he had no interest in finding out. It wasn't an important issue to him, but he just refused to believe it was true. 

 Dave Garnett 06 Apr 2020
In reply to planetmarshall:

> The late Kary Mullis, who shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the invention of PCR (widely used to test for COVID-19 amid a billion other things), was also known for his belief that he had been abducted by aliens and that HIV was not the cause of AIDS.

... and for having taken industrial quantities of psychotropic drugs.  I think the idea of chain reaction amplification came to him while he was under the influence.

 jkarran 06 Apr 2020
In reply to Thugitty Jugitty:

> Seriously, what do people think causes this stuff - they seem to be very sincerely held and unshakeable beliefs. 

I think it's an evolutionary quirk, we're hard wired to 'believe' in order to simplify our world and sooth our anxieties about uncertainties. For most religion fills that need, some lack religion but retain the need, some need both. What triggers changes I have no idea though drugs seem a risk. Worrying to think we're probably all susceptible to falling down one of these rabbit holes, if not always then at least from time to time.

jk

Post edited at 15:38
 deepsoup 06 Apr 2020
In reply to jkarran:

> Worrying to think we're probably all susceptible to falling down one of these rabbit holes, if not always then at least from time to time.

When you read about our many and various cognitive biases of one kind or another, I think it's pretty clear than we all live down one of these rabbit holes at least to some extent most of the time.  A lot of us strenuously deny that we're subject to these same cognitive biases that all humans share, I wonder if it would make any difference if a short basic psychology course covering the topic was on the school curriculum.

 colinakmc 06 Apr 2020
In reply to Hooo:

There is a form of psychosis that manifests itself only as delusional thinking and doesn’t necessarily impact on the sufferer’s general ability to function. More usually it involves spouses committing adultery with miscellaneous celebs, weather men or whatever (ie far fetched enough to be impossible) but might be a factor in the adoption of conspiracy theories such as these.

(nb. I’m not psychiatrically qualified so there’s bound to be someone along in a minute to give a better explanation.)

 dread-i 06 Apr 2020
In reply to Hooo:

I was on a call today and can state that none of the masts that have been attacked were carrying a 5G signal. What was amusing is that when they are being replaced, it is easier to replace then with a 5G capable mast. There is little point in fixing the 4G one and then having to upgrade it at some point in the near(ish) future.

What I took from that video was that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. The easy way to test his theory would have been to power it up and measure the voltages. The 415v capacitors might be cheaper than 240v one as, being over engineered, would probably last longer on a 240v supply. You could plug a scope into the rf output to measure the frequency (assuming it transmits). A Linux Gnu Radio could then talk to it and either make the light go on or off, or kill everyone in the area.

There is a feedback loop. People have concerns around things they don't understand. People post shite. They make money from the shite. They post more. People watch more. Add in a few trolls doing it for the lol's. Some vested interests sponsoring content. Repeat. Cash in.

OP Hooo 06 Apr 2020
In reply to dread-i:

It is curious and a little suspicious how ignorant he can be regarding electronics while still recognising a capacitor and understanding that it has a voltage rating. If he'd bothered to learn that much you'd think he'd learn a little more and work out what the device was doing.

To get technical, any mains powered device will have the capacitors rated to at least 400V. Mains is AC and 240V is the average value. The caps have to withstand the normal peak voltage of about 340V, and have a bit of headroom so that they don't explode at the first spike on the power line.

 jonfun21 06 Apr 2020
In reply to dread-i:

Totally agree - unbelievable that we have had engineers being physically attacked and verbally abused, vans being trashed, towers/poles being burnt down and companies being targeted by groups - utter utter madness and totally unacceptable behaviour.
 

You also now have effort focused on trying to rebuild sites and secure existing ones rather than maintaining the networks and increase capacity where required.....at a time we are even more reliant upon them. 
 

As you say most sites won’t yet have 5G on them (not that it makes any difference) and either way they host all technologies so all phone signal is lost via this action - the irony is once done at least these people can’t access the internet “out and about” to continue to pedal the conspiracy and insight people to commit arson/violence. 

Friday, the weekend and today was a very depressing and stressful day for our industry.

Post edited at 19:37
 dread-i 06 Apr 2020
In reply to Hooo:

He mentions part 15 FCC, and states that it is illegal, as it doesn't comply. FCC, of course, being an American standards body. I dont know how active they are in in enforcing UK law. The sealed box, looks to be a switched mode PSU. There are rectangular holes on the side of the box. I would hazard a guess that the base unit has pegs that engage with those holes. To remove it you'd need to disengage multiple pegs. Perhaps he found it tricky to remove. If it was really anti tamper, it would be filled full of hardened resin.

>... and have a bit of headroom so that they don't explode at the first spike on the power line.

A power spike will cause the unit to explode. An independent electronics expert on the internet said that. Which confirms its use as a weapon.

<see what I did there>

If you challenge this nonsense, your words can be simply taken out of context to support any crackpot theory. Or they can just as easily say that you're a shill for MI5, CIA, NSA, MFI etc. More controversy, more page views, more money in the bank.

In reply to dread-i:

The irrationality of it is stupefying. If you are against what we say you must be one of them, if for you must be a totally trustworthy source with inside information.


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