Ryan Bridge: The problem with internet conspiracy theories

Early Edition with Ryan Bridge

Kamala Harris was wearing audio earrings during the debate this week.

Did you hear about this? Yeah, she was cheating.

They looked like pearl earrings, but they also look like audio earrings. You can buy them, and you can have your staff feed you information in real time during a debate, they can coach you live.

Yeah, it's real, I read it on the internet.

That's the problem, isn't it? On some corners of the internet there's the dog-duck-immigrant conspiracy thing, there's the trans migrant prisoner sex change thing, and now there's the Kamala earrings thing.

Misinformation, disinformation, conspiracies, whatever they are, they seem to be everywhere at the moment.

Kamala Harris is pushing the conspiracies too, remember she said during the debate that Trump would implement project 2025 if elected, he says he won't.

Isn't that the same thing? Just lies, just making stuff up?

Don't get me wrong, I do love a good conspiracy, especially the bizarre ones you get out of the States, but I would never go nuts online trying to prove one.

The internet's screwed our brains in that way, what would have once just been a word of mouth, rumour, or gossip now spreads and presents itself as real news and is lapped up by millions of people.

The biggest problem I reckon, we have two cohorts of internet users, ones who have lived the most of their lives without the internet and they place a lot of faith and trust in what's being written and said because that's how we used to operate, remember?

And then there are those who are URL natives who know full well the absolute crap and the shite that you get online – which is not to say it's a generational thing because, you know, people at both ends can get caught out.

But we are supposedly living right now in the enlightened age where the internet would democratise information, make it accessible to all of us.

We'd all be better informed and better off with all the knowledge of human history available at the click of a finger.

And what have we done with that?

Cats, dogs, ducks, and audio airings.

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