From COVID-19 to the explosion in Beirut: why we believe fake news

2020 will certainly be remembered as one of the most disastrous years of recent decades: from the crisis between the US and Iran, to the wild fires in Australia, to the COVID-19 pandemic and the explosion at the port of Beirut. As these events unfold around us the world is getting more and more connected, news travels faster than light and immediately after the frightening explosion that occurred on the 4th of August in the Lebanese capital, videos of that terrible event spread around the planet and in less than a minute the images of the disaster were visible in the four corners of the globe.

While correct information reaches users in an increasingly rapid and widespread way, fake news also multiplies at the same speed. Often it is created by real disinformation industries (such as the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg), but aside from the reasons why it is created it is surprising that it has so much following and that readers are literally at the mercy of professional fake news developers.

Actually there are at least three emotional reasons why fake news has so much success and which also confirm how the alleged rationality of the human being is often widely overestimated.

Confirmation bias

We are all victim of our own confirmation bias. That means that when we scroll through the news on the homepage of a newspaper or on a social network we are more attracted by the pieces that confirm our vision of the world, to the point that we may not see at all those who oppose it. For example, if we do not trust government institutions we will end up believing more easily the theories according to which governments hide the truth from us, therefore we will think that the SARS-Cov2 virus was not born in nature, but escaped from a laboratory, or that the explosion Beirut was an attack ordered by some foreign government (usually the US and Israel are the main targets of alternative theories).

Conspiracy theories offer quick answers

When we are emotionally affected by an event (even if only because we see it on TV, without being actually present) human nature pushes us to want to know in the shortest possible time why and how the event that hit us occurred, because knowing it relieves the discomfort. And while under stress we usually produce negative thoughts. This causes quick explanations that give an answer to "Why did this happen?" to be accepted and conspiracy theories usually arrive long before official explanations, because investigations take months and even years.

Therefore rather than believing that we do not yet know which animal acted as a link between bat and man, we prefer a complete explanation such as that that it is a biological weapon. Similarly, rather than accepting that we do not know what material exploded at the port of Beirut and how it was triggered, we prefer to accept a full, even if potentially wrong, explanation: such as it was material seized from Hamas or that it was a military or terrorist attack on Beirut disguised as something different.

Conspiracy theories bring order to chaos

The human mind does not like chaos, and prefers order. Thinking that the explosion in Beirut or the COVID-19 pandemic were events that happened by chance, and that more precise controls would have been enough to prevent them clashes with the scale of the disaster they caused. We prefer to believe that there is a conspiratorial design behind it and that everything was planned. This phenomenon is particularly evident in the cases of the premature deaths of stars of music, cinema and sports. We have a hard time believing that a lonely madman killed John Lennon, we hardly believe that stress and pressure led to Kurt Cobain to shoot himself. We prefer to believe that the world is orderly and that there is a conspiracy behind it all.