[미디어세상] How Conspiracy Theories Disappear – The Kyunghyang Shinmun

2023-04-23 20:00:11

you are being deceived What you know is fabricated. Those you did not know are secretly manipulating world affairs. It’s a common conspiracy theory. It may belong to human nature to want to deny that we cannot believe in the reality we do not want to believe. Conspiracies in the world are endless, but what if you are a victim of conspiracy theories?

Joon-Woong Lee Professor, Department of Communication, Seoul National University

American cable news network Fox has been spreading conspiracy theories that the 2020 US presidential election was rigged. Dominion, a ballot counting company designated as the party to manipulate the voting results, succeeded in obtaining a large amount of settlement money after filing a defamation lawsuit against Fox. The disgrace of being identified as a party to the conspiracy was resolved through an agreement.

Upon hearing the news of Fox’s defeat, American citizens expressed their joy and regret at the same time. The cheers came from the judgment that the punishment of conspiracy theorists who continued to spread election manipulation theories and undermined the legitimacy of the current government and discredited American democracy was justified. The reasons for regret are complex. One of them is that we missed the opportunity to witness the verdict of the jury ordering punitive damages to them after confirming through the trial that the sophistry and excuses of the conspiracy theorists are groundless. With an agreement rather than a verdict, citizens lost the opportunity to hear any expressions of remorse or apology from the conspiracy theorists.

Indeed, this is how justice is done. The villain is agile and has no qualms, but the punishment is slow, frustrating, and there is no sense of blow. If illegality is disadvantageous, it immediately lowers its tail and seeks servile compromise, but justice humbles itself as if there is no ‘glory’ even if it wins. But hopefully this isn’t all. We can only hope that justice will not rest as the villain does. Indeed, as with conspiracy theories, discourse struggles and lawsuits mobilizing exposure and accusation continue.

Dominion wasn’t just pointing to Fox as the epicenter of the conspiracy in the first place. A series of defamation lawsuits have been filed against politicians such as Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and Mike Lindle, who helped right-wing broadcaster One America Network and former President Donald Trump. Fox wasn’t the only one sued by Dominion. Another U.S. presidential election ballot counting system provider, Smartmatic, is also filing a large-scale defamation lawsuit against Fox.

It has already been a long time since the diagnosis that democracy is weak and lamentation that it is in permanent crisis has become popular. Those who deplore the fragility of democracy are not necessarily democrats. There is no law that says that worrying about helping democracy will necessarily result in helping democracy. It is a paradox, not a paradox, that it can contribute to making the theory of a crisis of democracy a reality by emphasizing that undemocratic administrative orders or anti-human rights punishment laws must be introduced due to excessive concerns about weak democratic procedures.

Denying the choice of the voters, the source of democratic authority, by making ambiguous claims that are not known whether it is actually lamentation or agitation is undermining democratic legitimacy. A typical example is the conspiracy theory that there is a force that manipulated voter lists, bought votes, discarded valid votes, and manipulated vote counting results. Since the real heinous intent of conspiracy theories is to cast doubt on democratic rules and procedures, so that they do not function properly, it is almost as if blaming and replying to such conspiracy theories would seem to dull the workings of democracy.

But there is no other way. There is no way to stop the mouth that raises a conspiracy theory with eyes that do not know whether it is naive ignorance or cunning ploy. There is no other way to deal with the gesture of attacking democracy while hiding its true intentions, whether it be sincere anger or a trader’s ploy. A robust democracy is a society in which the majority believes that the very democratic rules and procedures that conspiracy theorists take issue with must be put in place to counter the wild conspiracy theories that attack democracy.