Ebola Conspiracies: A Tale of Two Daily Mail Articles

The Daily Mail‘s story about
Ebola conspiracy theories begins by describing a yarn in which the
epidemic’s victims are now literally rising from the dead. In the
Mail‘s usual write-first, ask-questions-later style, the
paper declares that this story “went viral” without bothering to
ask how many people who shared it knew damn well that it was a
joke. (The tale came from a
humor site, and while I’ve
learned the hard way that satire can zoom over people’s heads,
it’s not exactly unthinkable that people might forward a story
about zombies and even play at being frightened about it as a form
of fun.) The article then covers several other bits of online
hearsay, such as a YouTube video
that claims The Simpsons “predicted” the crisis with a
throwaway Ebola gag in 1997. (Put differently, the show made an
Ebola joke two years after the press heavily covered an Ebola
outbreak in Zaire.) This theory does not seem to be a
joke, though I suspect that somewhere between 90 and 99 percent of
the people sharing it just think it’s funny.

The other items in the Mail piece are more serious,
though one of them—a rumor that drinking salt water can prevent or
cure the disease—doesn’t really qualify as a conspiracy theory,
given that no one is conspiring in it.

But there’s one Ebola conspiracy theory that’s missing from the
report. It
goes like this:

Terrorist group Isis may be considering using Ebola as
a suicide bio-weapon against the West, according to a military
expert.

The virus is transmitted by direct contact with an infected person
who is showing the symptoms—and it wouldn’t be difficult for
fanatics to contract it then travel to countries they want to wreak
havoc in, according to a military expert.

Capt. Al Shimkus, Ret., a Professor of National Security Affairs at
the U.S. Naval War College, said that the strategy is entirely
plausible.

That’s The Daily Mail again. To the reporter’s credit,
he goes on to quote several people explaining why this would be a
rather stupid and difficult terror strategy that isn’t likely to
work, but of course the headline highlights the alleged threat, not
the debunkers.

The ISIS scenario is a conspiracy theory by any
reasonable standard—terror cells are conspiracies, right?—and it
isn’t a very plausible one. But it’s one that
the Mail takes seriously, so it doesn’t get listed
with the others. An old saying comes to mind, something about motes
and beams.

Bonus link: I wrote a book about conspiracy theories,
and it
just came out in paperback.