Uh, this is, I think it was a study by the American Academy of sciences at their last kind of convention, which actually went there. The a scientist went along to the a U S flat earth convention and spoke to people there and asked, how did you get into the flat earth movement?
And of the 40 people they asked, 39 of them said, I saw it recommended to me on YouTube. And the faulty of said, my son saw it, recommended to him on YouTube and pass it along to me. So it's what's appearing in that right-hand bar of up next on YouTube.
So I think when there were people who were looking for moon landing denial videos, YouTube, once these Flat earth videos started getting out there and started having a sensationalist kind of style, so it'd have a sensationalist title, uh, there'd be people, people would come and watch it because they believed it.
Some people watch it cause they thought it was silly. Some people watched it because they wanted to scrutinize it on a point by point basis and watch it five times in a row to really get to the grips of every single argument. So they could write an article about how wrong it is. YouTube at the time said that it didn't say there's three distinct audiences with three distinct agendas.
It says there's one audience of three times the size. So this is a pretty good video because loads of people are watching this all the way to the end. And so once YouTube saw that it started recommending it to people.
So you'd be watching a video about moon landing denial and YouTube would say, I think someone who's a bit into moon landing denial might also be into the flat earth theory and it would float it there as a suggestion. And if people clicked it, that solidified that link a little bit and the more people clicked it, the more that became solidified. And I think that's how a lot of people find their way in. And then it's because it became such a solid link.
I think it even went beyond people who are already looking for conspiracy theory, uh, ideas. Um, you had people who'd be looking for videos of the, of the earth from space and they might see this video and then then they might watch it.
And then that kind of strengthens those relationships. So YouTube had this kind of arguably accidental, I don't think they were deliberately doing it, but had this algorithm that was recommending sensationalist and extreme ideas regularly to people who were searching for things that weren't necessarily about that.
And I think that did serve as a, as a recruitment tool and those two videos and the responses to those, those two videos and video series from Mark Sergeant, Eric Dubay, that really ignited a movement because I think they came around with just the right time or the wrong time in our perspective, uh, that it captured, uh, that YouTube algorithm in full flow.
Uh, so what do just, I'm interested specifically in the videos you say of, uh, the earth from space or the moon. What's the response? Those are all faked? Yeah, pretty much. So, uh, I, I've, I've had lots of conversation with flat earthers and when you bring up those visual pieces of evidence, they'll say, well come on, you can't trust visual evidence. And they say photographs for example, you show me a photograph from of the, of the earth from space. I'll show you a composite job, I'll show you a Photoshop job, I'll show you a hoax.
And they'll say that NASA even admits that those four photographs are composites, is that, will they are composites. But even if they are, composites, they're composites of what their comes into photos taken from space. It's just they're taken with a camera that isn't far enough away to get the entire earth and in one goal.
But you're going to see snapshots of the earth and then you come, you compose those together because you've got a two dimensional representation of a three dimensional object. You're going to have to sort of stitch those together a little bit, but just cause it's a composite, it's gotta be it composed of something you're saying.
It's a composite doesn't throw out the fact that this is actually a genuine photo as well. Um, and so they will talk a lot about how, uh, we can't trust NASA.
That's a big, big part of it. Really, really fun. Um, and I went there not to tell them they're wrong and not to be superior, but to really understand what brings people to that movement. NASA is a tool of the government, a tool of the Illuminati, a tool of the new world order.
Um, they rely on their budgets so they need to keep that money rolling in, which is why they keep churning out material that suggest the world is round. Uh, and they have all sorts of convoluted uh, explanations as to why that is. Uh, one of my favorite explanations was one of the speakers at the flat earth convention an Argentinian conspiracy theorist who said, we know for a fact that the UN is a front for the one world order because if you look at the Spanish name for the UN, it is the O N U and if you read that backwards it's U N O which is Spanish for one.
And therefore we know for a fact the UN is a, a front for the one world order because the reverse name of it in Spanish is Spanish for one. And my friend I was at the convention with leftover and said does he realize that UN is already French for one? MM: It is. And so they'll see that and they'll say, well, look at the, uh, look at the image, the logo of the U N and you have the flat earth, you have the Arctic circle in the middle, you have all the continents around it. And so let's say, why would the UN have the flat earth as their local?
If it isn't true that the world is flat? And I had this conversation with the flat earther and I said, well, what else would you want the UN's logo to be?
And it's, well you could, if the earth is really round, you'd show it from the side. Okay, but then which countries are you not putting on? Do you want to show America and not Europe? Do you want to show the Northern hemisphere and not show Australia? And so he said, well, okay, fine. So you show up from the top. But if that's the case, why isn't that Antarctica on the UN's logo, it's missing. And his idea for that is because Antarctica is either the disk around the edge or it's where the dome that surrounds the world is.
And I said, well, Antarctica isn't a nation. This is the United nations. It isn't a nation. You know, there's good reasons. If you, if you sort of sense check these ideas, but if you're presented them in a way that says the U N is a front for the Illuminati and the one world order, and here's proof, look at their logo, therefore flat and you're not, then encouraged to sense check your ideas to uh, to look for ways to doubt yourself, to look for ways to disprove your theories rather than looking for evidence that proves them.
You end up in a place where all you're doing is confirming your ideas further and further and further. And this is what we see. We see it in our lives all the time and we're guilty of it all the time. But I think we're guilty of this. This is a movement that's specifically guilty of it. SM: Does Heliocentrism hold and the other planets are flat disks or something as well or are they?
MM: yeah, it depends on who you talk. So it's not just that there's the disk version and the infinite plane version. There's actually lots of, there's a myriad of different versions of the, the flat earth and the universe beyond it. So some will believe that we're flat. But the universe around it is pretty much as is, that's quite a niche belief in the flat earth world.
Um, some believe that, uh, many believe the sun isn't very far away, so it's very hard to, to uh, justify the solar system as conventional science would have it with a flat earth belief, especially a flat earth belief that may be rooted in creationism and therefore has this kind of earth as the center of everything kind of way. And you know, the sun was created on, on one of the days after the earth, it was already created.
And so some of that belief that instead of the sun being millions and millions of miles away, it's actually quite nearby and much smaller. And that's how they account for time differences across, uh, across the world. In , Christopher Columbus was shocked when his ship made landfall in a land Europeans had never explored.
Wrong: Despite a persistent legend, neither Columbus nor his Spanish patrons thought Earth was a finite plane instead of a round planet. Legend has it that he defied Spanish officials to do so, sailing west instead of East because he was certain the world was round. Detail of Portrait of Christopher Columbus. That was thanks to scientists, philosophers and mathematicians who, as early as around B.
Islamic scholars made further advanced measurements from about the 9th century AD onwards, while European navigators circled the Earth in the 16th century. Images from space were final proof, if any were needed. The notion of a flat Earth initially resurfaced in the s as a backlash to scientific progress, especially among those who wished to return to biblical literalism. Perhaps the most famous proponent was the British writer Samuel Rowbotham — The International Flat Earth Research Society, which was set up in by Samuel Shenton, a signwriter living in Dover, UK, was regarded by many people as merely a symbol of British eccentricity — amusing and of little consequence.
But in the early s, with the Internet now a well-established vehicle for off-beat views, the idea began to bubble up again, mostly in the US. Discussions sprouted in online forums, the Flat Earth Society was relaunched in October and the annual flat-Earth conference began in earnest.
As with any fringe movement there are disagreements and several different flat-Earth models exist to choose from. Others suggest our flat planet and its atmosphere are encased in a huge, hemispherical snow globe from which nothing can fall off the edges.
To account for night and day, most flat-Earthers think the Sun moves in circles around the North Pole, with its light acting like a spotlight. Physicists will scoff at these ideas, but the worrying thing is that they are spreading rapidly and gaining proponents outside America too.
Such efforts are important. This shocking number has been attributed to a resurgent evangelical Christian church, but there are also signs that religious fundamentalism is spreading these ideas in Islamic countries too.
In the website Jeune-Afrique reported that a geology student in Tunisia was intending to submit a PhD defending her work on a flat-Earth model. It would be easy to dismiss flat-Earthers as simply being misguided due to a lack of education.
Landrum thinks this conspiracy mentality is linked to science denial and a susceptibility to believing deceptive claims on social media Politics and the Life Sciences 38 Their lack of trust in authority includes not just scientists but scientific bodies such as NASA, all of whom they think are part of a massive conspiracy to prevent the flat-Earth truth being revealed. McIntyre adds that the flat-Earthers he interacted with each believed a selection of conspiracy theories, including that governments control the weather and that chem-trails from aeroplanes consist of chemical or biological agents.
But the fact remains that the videos are still on its platform. After all, their ideas are all generally based on fallacies and misunderstanding of science. But even without the visual confirmation of pictures taken from space, many of the arguments used by flat-Earth proponents can be easily dismissed with trigonometry or basic physical laws.
Like spotlights, these celestial spheres illuminate different portions of the planet in a hour cycle. Flat-earthers believe there must also be an invisible "antimoon" that obscures the moon during lunar eclipses. Furthermore, Earth's gravity is an illusion, they say.
Objects do not accelerate downward; instead, the disc of Earth accelerates upward at 32 feet per second squared 9. Currently, there is disagreement among flat-Earthers about whether or not Einstein's theory of relativity permits Earth to accelerate upward indefinitely without the planet eventually surpassing the speed of light. Einstein's laws apparently still hold in this alternate version of reality. As for what lies underneath the disc of Earth, this is unknown, but most flat-earthers believe it is composed of "rocks.
Then, there's the conspiracy theory: Flat-earthers believe photos of the globe are photoshopped; GPS devices are rigged to make airplane pilots think they are flying in straight lines around a sphere when they are actually flying in circles above a disc. The motive for world governments' concealment of the true shape of the Earth has not been ascertained, but flat-earthers believe it is probably financial. Flat-earth believers are not relegated to the hidden corners of the universe: Plenty of celebs have been quite vocal with their beliefs.
For instance, on Jan. B released a track called "Flatline" in which he disses astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, after the two had a Twitter battle over the spherical-ness of the planet.
B is convinced Earth is flat. A day earlier, the rapper tweeted: "No matter how high in elevation you are
0コメント