The past 24 hours have been a journey. Logging off from the social media worlds of Twitter and Instagram, I trusted Infowars.com for my daily updates about the world. The main reason for doing this was to expose myself to the opinions on the other side of the spectrum that I might not necessarily agree with, much like Alex Jones’ belief that tap water has been contaminated with chemicals that turn frogs gay. Reading about ‘a coup against the president of the US’ or ‘Greta Thunberg not being old enough to lecture people about climate change’, It’s Safe to say my experience was …different?
Watch Greta Thunberg Fall On Her Face – The Alex Jones Show, banned.video
The Infowars website is mostly full of extremely conservative opinions that I personally don’t identify with and some of which were difficult to listen to, especially the video above where Jones uses hate speech to break down almost everything I morally believe in. As someone who believes that climate change is real, it was tough trying to understand this point of view. Another such news article was about Greta Thunberg, which addressed her speech as a “lecture” about the “made up” climate change issue and it summed up how she’s ‘fake’ and is being portrayed by the media to set off panic among the youth. Thinking about it, most of our information is sourced from biased online media representations and word of mouth. Speaking from personal experience with my extended family members and friends, the average consumer rarely focuses on fact-checking the convenient headlines they read unless they’re really interested in the topic.
Although Infowars attempts to establish itself as a platform where brave people represent the ‘true stories others are afraid to tell’, the thing that concerns me is that Truth has become arbitrary in today’s Woke world where everyone has a different perspective on ethics and moral rights. Most of Jones’ followers are from the far right wing and are ready to believe whatever conspiracies he tells them. Plenty of these people blindly trust and share the information they find in their filter-bubbles online, which is detrimental to actual communication, sharing of ideas and true information across the globe. Misleading websites like Infowars are echo-chambers in themselves, that continue adding fuel to the flame by amplifying and validating the same propaganda on repeat.
As much as I found myself doubting the legitimacy of the website as a whole, a jarring thing about this experience was how sometimes the website would make me doubt myself, my knowledge and ideologies. Jones and his crew keep repeating words until the message is stuck in your head to the point it almost feels like brainwashing. John Oliver could be right about Alex Jones being a great businessman who knows how to sell his overpriced products to his devoted fans and earn $20 million revenue for Infowars.
I feel that it is very important to raise awareness about websites like Infowars, that spawn false rumors & fake news to market products and propaganda. 21st Century is extremely chaotic as it is. Let’s not jump on the bandwagon to carelessly repost chaos without judging the legitimacy of our sources.
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