Daily Stormer The Most Censored Publication in History
The only solution is to make mass censorship even more extreme.
You can’t just allow people to go around disagreeing with the government. It’s simply not right. The government works with the science to find the truth, and these people just go around saying things that are wrong.
Free speech doesn’t mean freedom from being censored.
CNN:
When wildfire ripped through Hawaii’s Maui last August, the impact was devastating: a whole town reduced to ashes, more than 100 lives lost. The inferno was described as the “largest natural disaster in state history.”
But some on Instagram suggested, without evidence, there was something much more nefarious at play.
Wellness influencer @truth_crunchy_mama told her 37,000 followers to “stop blaming things on nature that were actually caused by the government.” They’re “going to keep setting wildfires until we all submit to their climate change agenda,” she said in another post.
Health influencer @drmercola suggested to his 504,000 followers whether, while the media focused on climate change, the fires might have been deliberately set to “to facilitate a land grab” to make the area a “smart city” — referring to a technology-focused urban design idea.
A natural parenting influencer, whose Instagram page is filled with soft-focus pictures of herself against pretty pastel backgrounds, inferred to her 76,000-strong community that Hawaii’s wildfires were started by “directed energy weapons” — systems which use energy such as laser beams.
These posters are all wellness influencers — a loosely-defined umbrella term for a wide range of accounts including yoga, lifestyle, fitness, alternative health and new age spirituality.
While conspiracy theories about the Hawaii wildfires spread across the internet last year, it may seem surprising they were also seized upon by part of the wellness community.
But for years there has been a merging of wellness, disinformation and conspiracy, as a subset of influencers use the backdrop of aesthetically pleasing, pastel-colored posts to spread much darker messages, weaving together alarming conspiracy theories with calls for users to buy their supplements or services.
This phenomenon exploded during the pandemic, when anti-vax sentiment took hold in large parts of the wellness community. As interest in the pandemic waned, experts say some wellness influencers have latched on to climate change to galvanize followers.
Their concern: Those influencers — some with hundreds of thousands of followers — are exposing new, and younger, audiences to a slew of misinformation and undermining efforts to tackle the climate crisis.
Cécile Simmons, a trained yoga teacher, was surprised when many of the wellness accounts she followed started posting about climate change. “It just started popping up in my feed and I thought OK, that’s interesting, now that COVID is ‘over’ they’re diversifying the narrative,” she told CNN.
Simmons, also a researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a UK-based think tank focused on disinformation, started digging. She pored over more than 150 wellness accounts, most of which had between 10,000 to 100,000 followers. All offered wellness advice, sold related products and promoted some form of misinformation.
The claims Simmons found were sweeping and varied, ranging from outright climate denial to attempts to undermine climate solutions by portraying them as part of a global plot for control.
Some focused on deadly extreme weather events, saying they were orchestrated by the government, or that malign global forces were modifying the weather. Others claimed climate policies were a plot to control people’s lives, bodies and diets. A small section of new age accounts asserted that climate change was the result of a disconnection with forces in the universe.
Rejecting climate action may seem counterintuitive for wellness influencers, who often focus on nature or evoke bucolic visions of the past. But when you have insight into this world, it tracks, Simmons said.
A strong thread of individualism runs through wellness accounts, alongside a deep distrust of authorities. “They emphasize individual solutions to collective problems, and they sell wellness as a response to climate anxiety,” she said.
Many of these influencers maintain they are merely speaking truth to power. It’s a theme of @truth_crunchy_mama account, who calls herself a “truth teller.” The person who runs the account did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.
Some even say they accept the human-caused climate crisis.
Joseph Mercola, the man behind the @drmercola Instagram account, told CNN that “humans are absolutely impacting the environment and the climate.” When asked about his comments on Hawaii’s wildfires, he said he accepts the consensus that dry conditions and strong winds fueled the blaze. “It was never stated that it was definitely intentional,” he said, “although some have speculated that is a possibility.”
His climate posts are often framed in this way, not making definitive claims but rather asking questions like: Is the idea of eating insects “part of globalists’ ‘green agenda?’” Or advertising guest posts suggesting the “war on climate change” follows “the same playbook used by nefarious individuals who lust for complete power over the citizens.”
…
Influencers crave relevance, said Callum Hood, head of research at the Center for Countering Digital Hate, and “climate change is a big relevant issue that’s in the news all the time.”
It is a short ideological leap from vaccine conspiracies to climate conspiracies, Hood told CNN: If the establishment is wrong about health, the thinking goes, then they’re also lying to you about climate change.
Yeah, they just want attention, which is why they don’t believe every single thing that the government/media says.
It’s so obvious that this is the only reason someone would disagree with the media/government, given the long track record of the media/government for only ever telling the truth and being right about everything.
Increasingly, “wellness” = basket of BS conspiracies
Study: “Many Wellness & New Age influencers post outright misinformation or denial about climate change…”https://t.co/AFFKS73BTC by @CecileNSimmons via @ISDglobal
“Climate is inextricably linked to discussions around…
— Timothy Caulfield (@CaulfieldTim) January 31, 2024
