The scene becomes clear: A car is driving along a mountain road at night. The headlights suddenly flicker and then fade to black. The car is stopped dead. The car stops dead at the stop sign.
TVTropes.com points out that only three things can happen on a horror movie road trip, and all three involve horrors. You might be tempted not to shout "Don't go in the Woods!" because it isn't good for anyone to go into the woods at night. She does. She finds an abandoned log cabin. The rest of the story can be written by you.
WIRED OPINION ON Renee DiResta (@noUpside), is an Ideas contributor to WIRED. She writes about discourse and the Internet. As the Stanford Internet Observatory's technical research manager, she studies narrative manipulation. Beth Goldberg (@_BGoldberg), manages research at Jigsaw, an affiliate of Google, on misinformation and hate.
These tropes become very predictable over time. They are used for many purposes. The same way storytellers use tropes in songs, movies, and TV to make their stories more relatable and understandable, and ultimately to entertain us, disinformation purveyors also use the same tropes for making their arguments more relatable or understandable, and ultimately to manipulate us. This knowledge may help us keep more people out of the woods.
There are many tropes you've likely seen in memes online and stories about Covid-19. Over a century, the anti-vaccine movement relied on the same plot device to make their baseless claims seem familiar and convincing.
SIGN UP Subscribe to WIRED to stay informed with your favorite Ideas writers.
Anna Kata, an economist from McMaster University, published a paper in 2012 that tracked how the same tropes are recur regardless of the vaccine. Consider, for example, the general claim that vaccines are not natural. They didn't. Today, social media influencers spin stories about how mRNA vaccines can alter our DNA! They aren't. While the details may have been altered to accommodate the current pandemic outbreak, the fundamental tropes of 2021 are the same as in 1801.
This false trope is a key building block in a larger misleading narrative that vaccines pose a danger. American University and Harvard School of Public Health scholars, as well as a coauthor, recently discovered that anti-vaccine misinformation narratives regarding Covid-19 are similar to those about past vaccines. Some of these are conspiratorial. Bioweapon tropes were popular in the early months of pandemics. These claims have been made by anti-vaccine propagandists many times at the emergence novel diseases like Ebola, SARS etc. Because of the fear it creates. Because it is a mystery, the bioweapon trope of disease has been bought. It offers a neat explanation with a seed for truth: Bioweapons programs exist. Weve all seen that movie.
These building blockstropes also make conspiracy-theory stories transferable across topics. For example, the core narratives of anti-vaccine movements about vaccines causing all kinds of harms and the government covering up of those harms had been incorporated into the QAnon movement. This had absorbed and reframed narratives of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and chemtrails conspiracies and New World Order theories among others. Because conspiracy theories have a common structure, these tropes can be easily transferred. People who believe in one conspiracy theory may believe other theories because the same trope is common to multiple theories. For example, believing in the Man Behind the Curtain makes a person more likely to believe that the Man is concealing a program of chemtrails. Jigsaw, an organization within Google that investigates threats to open societies, interviewed 70 conspiracy believer to find out what they believed.
You are more likely to remember a trope if you have seen it once. This familiarity can shorten the time it takes to apply critical thinking to evaluate new information. Trites can be used to simplify complex topics, such as the origins of vaccines or the reasons behind a protest. Mike Caulfield, a media literacy expert, points out that tropes can reduce a scene to its core, stripping away details to force us to jump to conclusions (the heroine will get in her car!). Without all the facts.
These manipulative tropes are so common and recurrent that they could be their downfall. It is possible to anticipate which tropes will be used in conspiracy narrative constructions in the future. What if we discussed the underpinnings of specific claims preemptively, instead of reacting to them?
