Death by Conspiracy?: 8. Tracking the Timeline

0:02Like I mentioned before about social media, it kind of feeds you your interest, doesn't it? So what you like, the things that you're interested in.

0:09Marianna Spring:This is Duncan, Gary Matthews' cousin. See, for me, I'm interested in a lot of stuff. So, you know, I think I broke Facebook at one point because I've got like 14 ,000 pages that I've liked of different topics and different subjects. All types of history, technology, military technology, ancient history, you name it, you name it. I'm just fascinated by everything. Although I think it might be impossible to like more than 5 ,000 pages on Facebook, Duncan was clearly, like his cousin, an avid social media user. Again, it's 50-50 with social media. You can say it's a bad thing or it's a good thing.

0:45It connects people. I mean, how many people have not spoken to somebody in years or wonder where they've disappeared to? And it's reunited people. So it's got beauty and it's also got a dark side.

0:56Marianna Spring:Gary Matthews believed in Covid conspiracies and he posted about them online before in January 2021 he caught the virus and died at the age of 46 Throughout this series we've spoken about social media particularly Facebook groups that Gary was in and we've heard about his views on things like lockdown measures and masks and how his family and friends saw him behave but I want to look deeper into his online life and understand how what he was seeing online might have influenced him. What do we really mean when we say that social media draws people towards certain beliefs? I'm Marianna Spring from BBC Radio 4.

1:37Marianna Spring:This is Death by Conspiracy. Episode 8, Tracking the Timeline. Duncan, Gary's cousin, knows the upside-down world of online conspiracies all too well. In fact, he used to be interested in them himself, back in the early noughties. It's kind of when I got a laptop, really, I suppose, and I started scouring the internet myself. You know, you start asking questions about why things are going on in the world, and sometimes you can be led down, alternative sources, as they call them. It started, as it so often does, with a film about 9-11. You know, I watched a documentary called Loose Change. One of my friends showed me that, and you're like, whoa, this is insane, as if they're trying to say this is like an inside job.

2:24Marianna Spring:Duncan is no longer drawn to those beliefs. But his fascination with this world was one of the reasons he was able to spot that Gary was being sucked towards conspiratorial ideas too. And yet, to begin with, when Gary first signed up to social media in around 2010 and they started to chat more online, the conversations between the two men were pretty different. We had similar taste in music. That's kind of a big thing we talked about. We talked a lot about well-being. I mean, I suffer with depression and anxiety and stuff. So Gary's helped me a lot with that. In fact, Gary's social media profiles were very normal.

3:00Marianna Spring:He was a talented artist sharing his work. It was just more about his artwork. And I think he was trying to kind of boost that a bit, see if he can maybe monetise that a little bit and get his name out there, really. Because, I mean, if you've ever seen any of it, I mean, wow. I want to see Gary's online life for myself. so I start trying to hunt down his profiles but I soon find his Facebook profile has disappeared without a trace. When I turn to Twitter, however, I'm in luck. There's an account with Gary's name and picture on it. When he started posting in 2017, he mostly talked about his artwork.

3:37Marianna Spring:One painting shows Roger Moore in a black bow tie. I find the same picture on his Instagram profile along with photographs from trips to the seaside. It seems, especially at the start, that this was Gary's online life. So did all of our social media feeds just used to be a little, well, nicer? I'm Sasha Havlicek. I run the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which has worked now for 15 years on the combined threats of hate, weaponised hate, extremism and disinformation on and offline. Sasha says there's one big shift worth noting in the recent landscape of social media, how the algorithms have changed.

4:16The changes we've seen in our feeds, in what we see, are really about how the platform's business model has been refined over the years, so that they can ensure increased user engagement, which makes them money.

4:31Marianna Spring:And that means extreme emotional content thrives, and boring nice stuff doesn't. So we've got this push towards more sensationalist, quicker, shorter, less nuanced conversation online. Now, it's impossible to say exactly what Gary was seeing across his social media feeds, but we can see when what he was sharing started to change. That happened in early 2018. On February 20th of that year, he tweeted out a picture of that Roger Moore painting again. But then his feed takes a new turn, with a retweet of a happy birthday message. Not to a friend or a family member, but instead to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

5:15Marianna Spring:So how had he ended up here? During the Syrian war, disinformation in support of the Syrian president boomed. Sasha explained to me how people like Gary, with a keen interest in international politics, might be drawn into these false information campaigns. What they do very cleverly is play on quite legitimate perspectives. So anti-war sentiment, other interventions that the West is engaged with that were baseless, that were sort of based on lies, Iraq and so on and so forth. So they play on quite reasonable sentiments. And I think that in terms of the Syria propaganda has been very, very effective.

5:54It's essentially tapped into anti-war sentiment to mobilise in support of a warmonger.

6:01Marianna Spring:And as he posted more about Syria, his cousin Duncan began to challenge him on it, at least for a little while. I used to kind of, you know, quiz and ask him questions about it. So there was a little bit of conflict between me and him at first. Eventually kind of phased out really because obviously we respected each other massively for other interests. So we kind of decided to like not engage on social media in that sense. We kind of stepped away from that. Duncan did, however, urge him to be cautious. We'd go out for drinks and stuff like that. Sometimes obviously after a couple of beers, conversations may start a little bit, but then it would just fizzle out because we both kind of knew we didn't want to get into it, you know.

6:43We didn't want to fall out anymore about it, you know. And I just said, you know, just be careful. That was it, really, and that's all I could say to him, really.

6:51Marianna Spring:After 2018, what Gary posts on Twitter is a mix. It's certainly not all about conspiracies. He shares tweets in support of Brexit and of Jeremy Corbyn. It's worth saying here that people arrive at conspiracies from across the political spectrum. This isn't only a left-wing thing or a right-wing thing. And then, in early 2020, the focus of Gary's Twitter feed, like many, many others, shifts to COVID-19. On April 13, 2020, he liked a meme featuring Microsoft founder Bill Gates. It's surrounded by captions that imply Gates has something to do with the spread of the virus, that he's profiting off vaccines that, at that point, had yet to be developed.

7:33Marianna Spring:and there are even baseless allegations of paedophilia. He continued to like posts about Gates for months. I've been investigating COVID conspiracy theories from the start of the pandemic. But even I'm surprised at how quickly Gary got sucked into an alternative COVID reality. But Sasha from the Institute of Strategic Dialogue says it might not be such an unusual story after all. COVID has been the sort of mother of all crises in a way. So there we were faced with this massive unknown, huge amount of uncertainty, insecurity, everybody stuck at home, online, many people out of work with a lot of time on their hands.

8:15I mean, this was the sort of perfect storm for disinformation.

8:22Marianna Spring:While we don't know all of the groups Gary was a part of on Facebook, We do know he used his local group, For the Love of Shrewsbury, and that he was also a member of the Shropshire Corona Resilience Network. The original SCRN group received some media attention in the wake of Gary's death and was taken down by Facebook for violating policies on harmful misinformation. But just weeks later, in February 2021, a carbon copy of the SCRN popped up. Same name and cover photo, and with what would seem to be the same type of content. This group talks about depopulation, a supposed master plan to kill millions or billions by creating a pandemic.

9:04Marianna Spring:I see countless links to misleading videos and completely inaccurate information about the pandemic and the virus. So why do Facebook groups become such a vector for online disinformation? I mean, Facebook groups, they are unmoderated fiefdoms, essentially, run by admins and can be very powerful. Small numbers of people have outsized influence, actually, and so they can be extremely potent. Social media sites have policies to limit the spread of harmful disinformation and conspiracies about the pandemic. You know, this was a massive test for these platforms and by and large they failed. Research we did in 2020 saw content from known COVID disinfo sites get 13 times more engagement on Facebook than CDC and WHO content combined.

9:56Marianna Spring:That's two of the world's biggest health information websites. I asked Meta, which owns Facebook, why the SCRN group, which was clearly promoting mistruths and falsehoods about the pandemic, just like the old group, had been allowed to go live again and stay there for the best part of a year, serving as a key online rallying point for Shrewsbury's conspiracy underground. Just after we asked them about it, Facebook took the group down. They say the group violated their policies on re-offending. It seems to have escaped the systems they have to detect copycat groups. In a statement they told me, our thoughts are with Mr Matthews' family at this difficult time.

10:38Marianna Spring:Throughout the pandemic, we've been promoting reliable information about COVID-19 and the vaccines, while taking aggressive action against misinformation. Of course, they also know that this is a massive problem reputationally and and it would be unfair not to recognize the measures that they've taken to try and stop the spread of this type of content Facebook Google YouTube they have put in place measures to derank and actually to ban anti-vax content from their sites but ultimately they benefit from engagement. And so, in fact, COVID and the infodemic has probably been a pretty good boon for the platforms in terms of their bottom line.

11:26Marianna Spring:For Duncan, who was once into conspiratorial news sources himself, he can imagine what his cousin Gary's newsfeed might have become. As somebody who has been on social media and experienced that myself, it literally just becomes your newsfeed. You see nothing else apart from those kind of sources. Gary was much more into Facebook, so I know his Twitter feed is only the tip of the iceberg. But as I scroll through his final tweets, they make for haunting reading. On December 15th, 2020, he likes a post that says, I hope this is the only time in history when believing in fresh air and your immune system is classed as selfish.

12:05Marianna Spring:A few weeks later, Gary caught COVID. His cousin Duncan remembers hearing the news. My mum told me about he'd been tested positive. So obviously instantaneously I messaged him and said, you know, Gary, I really hope everything's OK. I hope we get better soon. That kind of thing, really. And I know that he saw it, you know, quite close to when they reckon he passed away. Duncan could see on Instagram that Gary had read his message. It meant that Gary was logged onto his social media profiles right up until the end. Yeah, so I'm just glad that he knew I was thinking about him really, I suppose. It's impossible to pinpoint exactly what role social media played in pushing Gary towards conspiracy theories or nurturing his interest in them.

12:53Marianna Spring:But he was certainly seeing and sharing them online. People who message me about loved ones drawn into an online world of disbelief and suspicion always tell me how their social media feeds are totally infected with conspiracies. That leaves me with a question. It's one that shadowed me while I've been making this series. When the rest of us log on, weary with lockdowns, anxious about what's happening, why don't we get sucked into this world? Can someone's personality make them more susceptible to conspiracies? and the stereotype of who gets drawn in, someone who's lonely, weird, even stupid. Have we got it all wrong?

13:34I don't really buy into the trope that you necessarily have to be this kind of bunkers, you know, basement dwelling sort of stereotypes that people say.

13:41Marianna Spring:I'm Marianna Spring, and that was episode 8 of Death by Conspiracy from Radio 4. Next time, I try to understand the mindset of a conspiracy theorist.

13:56Thank you.