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Closed Captioning/ Transcript Disclaimer Closed Captioning And/Or Transcription Is Being Provided Solely for the Convenience of Our Viewers Closed Captioning/ Transcript Disclaimer Closed captioning and/or transcription is being provided solely for the convenience of our viewers. Yoga Alliance does not review for accuracy any information that appears in a closed caption or transcript. Yoga Alliance makes no representations or warranties, and expressly disclaims any responsibility or liability with respect to, any errors or omissions in, or the accuracy, reliability, timeliness or completeness of, any information that appears in a closed caption or transcript. ALEX STAVITSKY-ZEINEDDIN: Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. This is a CEE workshop Yoga Alliance, The Rise of Conspiracy Theories and How to Address Them. My name is Alex Stavitsky- Zeineddin. I am she, he, her and I am a Yoga Alliance 200-hour cert certified instructor in Maryland. I just wanted to make sure first that you have this poll that you can tell us where you are coming from, North America, et cetera. You'll see that I think on your screen. And then I would like to present our speaker. Cecile Guerin is a researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, an international think tank working to fight extremism, disinformation and polarization. Her work focuses on social media analysis and network mapping related to far-right extremist mobilization, dis disinformation and conspiracy theories online. A long-standing yoga practitioner, she completed her 200-hour yoga with hot pod yoga and is interested in how the yoga community it play a role in fighting radicalization. With that, is there anything else I've missed here? The theme of the week again that we're doing is Techniques, Training and Practice Week. With that, Cecile, hello. CECILE GUERIN: Hello. Thank you, Alex, for the introduction. Welcome to everyone. It's a pleasure to be here to talk about the difficulty topic of conspiracy theories and how they have impacted the yoga community. I very much look forward to this discussion discussion. I'm going to share my screen now. If you'll just give me a minute to figure out that. In my day job I monitor and analyze extremism and disinformation, mainly focusing on social media analysis and open-source intelligence. About a year ago, in the very early days of the pandemic, I was doing research about COVID-19 conspiracy theories as part of my day-to-day job and I very quickly found that the Facebook pages and groups and Instagram accounts I was looking at fell under the umbrella of what we call conspiraactuality, the conflation between new age thinking and conspiracy theories. I found these accounts and pages appeared as the most active producers of conspiracy content which, as a yoga practitioner, was particularly interesting to me. Parallel to that, in my private social media interactions I found that yoga teachers and influencers shared conspiracy theories about the pandemic, anti- anti-vacciconspiracy theories and adopted the language of QAnon, which is the main conspiracy theory that has dominated during COVID-19. Today I'm going to talk about -- I'll briefly introduce QAnon, what it is, where it comes from and why it has grown so much during the pandemic. I will talk as well about how conspiracy theories have become embedded in the yoga community and what yoga teachers, practitioners and organizations can do to help spread -- to help counter the spread of dis disinformation. I'd like to start with a definition of conspiracy theories. There are quite a lot out there, but this one I find particularly helpful in framing the discussion. A conspiracy theory, according to political signists is an explanation of past, ongoing or future events or circumstances that cites as a main causal factor a small group of powerful persons acting in secret for their own benefit and against the common good. I think the key idea here is the idea of a group of powerful people working against the common good. This us versus them narrative and the idea of mall he have lent elites working against ordinary citizens is at the heart of QAnon and many of the conspiracy theories that have emerged during COVID-19. You've probably heard of QAnon in some shape or form. There has been a lot of talk about QAnon in the media recently and lately because of the Capitol insurrection on January 6 in which many QAnon followers took part. What is QAnon? QAnon at the simpest level is an online conspiracy theory that first started in October 2017 on the platform called 4 Chan, an unregulated message board with very little content moderation where people share, among other things, memes, explicit political content and discussions about gaming. Back in October October 2017, an anonymous user called themselves Q, starting posting about former President Trump's secret war against the Satan worshiping elite, which according to them was running child sex trafficking operations. That secret elite in QAnon language became known as the deep state, an expression you might have heard before. The deep state, according to the QAnon conspiracy theory, includes a number of top-level Democrats, Hollywood figures and various members of the elite. Since 2017, the person or people who are posting under the name of Q produced over 4,000 messages. They're called Q Drops or you may have heard the word breadcrumbs as well. These messages have been posted on 4 Chan and similar platforms, like 8 Chan and 8 Kun fringe platforms. The QAnon conspiracy has developed its own language. Believers in QAnon think -- they are waiting for the storm, which is the moment when Donald Trump defeats his enemies and the deep state is exposed exposed. This process happens through what the conspiracy called the great awakening. You may also have heard WWGIWGA, a statement of unity frequently used by QAnon followers. The QAnon conspiracy theories closely linked to Donald Trump himself and he's often called the hero or the savior but followers. What's important to bear in mind is that while it may be closely linked to Donald Trump, some of the fears that QAnon taps into are not new at all. The idea that there are pedophile elites kidnapping children and performing satanic rituals on them is not new. Actually, a year before QAnon first emerged, you had pizzagate which started on 4 Chan, where people thought they had founded coded and hidden messages that seemed to point to a child sex trafficking operation in a pizza place in Washington and that led a man from North Carolina to investigate that conspiracy. In the 1980s and 1990s, the US and other parts of the world, rumors started spreading which claimed elites were kidnapping children again to perform say tappic rituals on them. QAnon existed on the fringes for a few years, but in 2020 we saw a shift in how -- how fringe QAnon was. In 2020, QAnon went from a fringe movement to a mainstream movement. I'll tell you a little bit more about why. I would argue that with the Capitol riots, it became a mainstream extremist movement when people entered the Capitol. I believe that the pandemic really played a key role in bringing QAnon into the mainstream. So when the virus started spreading and lockdowns were introduced in various countries and people spent more time online, we saw an explosion of conspiracy theories online fueled by the breakdown of trust and security that the pandemic had caused. And established disinformation online communities like the anti- anti-vacciers increased their followers significantly and used their narrative. QAnon started merging with other conspiracy theories, like the anti-vacci, anti- anti-5G, and some of the narratives of the pandemic, all the while fueling distrust of mainstream media. The narrative was you can't trust the political elites. They are using the pandemic to impose dictatorship. You can't trust the World Health Organization either and mainstream media are lying to you. So QAnon was also key in spreading disinformation about Black Lives Matter after George Floyd's killing and rumors about voter proud during the 2020 elections in North America. What also happened in 2020 is that QAnon went international. Before 2020, it was very much a US US-based conspiracy theory, but we saw it emerge -- we started seeing QAnon in UK anti-lockdown protests, the same in Berlin, Germany and France, where QAnon has acquired a life of its own and adapted to the local context. December 2020 NPR poll showed that 17 percent of Americans believe in the core message of QAnon, that there are pedophile elites kidnapping children and using the pandemic to create a dictatorship dictatorship. A further 37 percent of people polled said they weren't sure about whether that was true or not. What QAnon did against the backdrop of the pandemic was offering a narrative of empowerment. So the idea is that evil, sex trafficking elites who are using the pandemic to control the world, but you can see through that, you can uncover the truth, and you can be awakened. I think we shouldn't undersummit how powerful this message of agency became when you don't have much agency at all because you're in lockdown. There's nothing you can do and the world is in a very uncertain place. The language and the slogans of QAnon started spreading widely online. Not just the hashtag QAnon but the language of the great awakening, or slogans like do your research, which is deceptive, but it was widely used by QAnon to basically say don't trust the mainstream media.
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