The Manchester wounded are only just getting hospital treatment, and conspiracy theorists are denying an attack happened

Just hours after the Manchester explosion that’s seen 19 killed and 50 hospitalised, keyboard warriors are already claiming it’s a false flag operation and there’s no actual evidence of it happening.

Pick a catastrophe. Sandy Hook in America, where schoolchildren were gunned down in an incident in 2012. The use of explosives on a coach carrying footballers in Germany, a few weeks ago. And now the Manchester incident in which 5 hospitals in the area have been treating victims of an explosion at a concert last night. What these and many other horrors have in common is that within minutes of the news going public, conspiracy theorists gather online to revel in the misery, and concoct theories as to why those events didn’t happen, and who the mainstream media has been colluding with to lie to the public.

Being suspicious of the media is no bad thing by the way. Let’s make that clear. And governments do have a track record of acting in horrible ways against their citizens. In the 1930s, black Americans were deliberately infected with syphilis by doctors, which led to 130 dying, 40 infecting their wives with the disease, and 19 children born with congenital syphilis. Not content with doing this on American soil, researchers did something similar in Guatemala in the 1940s. And from 1953 researchers spent 20 years looking for ways to control the minds of citizens, and conducted appalling experiments using LSD, electro convulsive therapy, and other methods on unwitting subjects, all as part of the MKULTRA project.

There’s plenty of documentation about outrages like those, and there are sadly many more. So – it’s unquestionably the case that there are occasions when governments conspire against their citizens. There’s a very big difference between that and claiming that anything unfortunate that happens is the result of a conspiracy. And sadly that’s where we are now in 2017, thanks in large part to the internet.

The fact that you and I can post online does not make us journalists. That much is clear. We all have some ability to form sentences, and the ability to put them on our Facebook posts, on forums, and so forth. But what most of us don’t have is either critical thinking skills, or access to the people involved in what’s going on at various world events. You don’t have to be a journalist to have those resources, but any good journalist will have both. Then they take the time to discover what’s going on. Sometimes it fits the initial narrative that appears about an event. Sometimes it doesn’t. When there’s a mismatch, it can simply mean that not all of the facts are known at a given point, and an early conclusion is invalid.

But for a particular subset of people, any new horror inflicted on the world is an opportunity to bend what’s going on with the shape of their theories. Families of people who lost children in the Sandy Hook killings are accused years later of being government shills, told that their sons and daughters never existed and that they are actors. The same happens for many traumas that crop up in the news – people who are prone to conspiratorial thinking leap on news items and use them to demonstrate whatever their pet theories are about One World Government, Zionism, or whatever else fascinates them.

Naturally, I have a theory about conspiracy theorists. And it’s that they are sad and lonely people looking for the connection. That’s the conclusion that researchers at Princeton University have come to, and is written up in the March 2017 issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. To explore the concept, they did an experiment which showed that students who were led to feel socially excluded were more likely to agree with a story suggesting that there was some kind of collusion between people. Those who hadn’t been intentionally alienated beforehand read the story in a more neutral way.

Conspiratorial thinking is sometimes right. But the possession of a keyboard does not make someone a dedicated seeker for the truth. Where devising and sharing conspiracy theories is concerned, what you’re seeing is someone who’s unsure of their place in the world, and by making a map of it which explains how other bad things happen, reassures themselves that they’re not alone.