The myth of the "0800sunny tourist" NZ Chemtrail spraying program debunked

Ok - not really - seriously - like I would own up to that!!   :P 

There are people who can make that happen - you just have to belief - have faith!!!!


Below some extracts from articles and studies and for keeping.

snip - - - - - - 

Conspiracy theories have been cooked up throughout history, but they're increasingly visible lately.
Given that any particular conspiracy theory is unlikely to be the subject of mainstream consensus, what draws people to them?

New research suggests that people with certain personality traits and cognitive styles are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories.
"These people tend to be more suspicious, un-trusting, eccentric, needing to feel special, with a tendency to regard the world as an inherently dangerous place," said Josh Hart, an associate professor at Union College in the US. "They are also more likely to detect meaningful patterns where they might not exist. "People who are reluctant to believe in conspiracy theories tend to have the opposite qualities."

It helps to realise that conspiracy theories differ from other worldviews in that they are fundamentally gloomy," Hart said.
"This sets them apart from the typically uplifting messages conveyed by, say, religious and spiritual beliefs. At first blush this is a conundrum.
"However, if you are the type of person who looks out at the world and sees a chaotic, malevolent landscape full of senseless injustice and suffering, then perhaps there is a modicum of comfort to be found in the notion that there is someone, or some small group of people, responsible for it all.
"If 'there's something going on,' then at least there is something that could be done about it."
 it is important to realise that when reality is ambiguous, our personalities and cognitive biases cause us to adopt the beliefs that we do.  As always, conspiracy theories could be true. The most prominent example is the reporting the National Enquirer did in the 2008 presidential campaign about a child then-Senator John Edwards had fathered out of wedlock.

But, for every one conspiracy theory that winds up being right, there are a thousand - or a million - that are totally without merit. That used to be a sentence that 98 per cent of the population could agree on. No longer. Our retreat into partisan camps, the rising dislike and distrust of "elites", the surge in partisan media outlets and the collapse of trust in the mainstream media has created a toxic environment in which conspiracy theories not only can bloom but are nurtured.
We all now see the hidden hand of government/media/corporations/foreign entities behind everything everyone does. And, what's worse, there's no trusted source of facts that we all agree can be used to debunk conspiracies.

Conspiracies grow and grow. And we believe them in ways we've never done before.
"This knowledge can help us understand our own intuitions."

The role of Facebook and other social media:

These theories are not circulating willy-nilly around Facebook as a whole. They spread within specific, defined, ideologically homogenous communities, or echo chambers, which might not be visible to the naked eye - but may as well be walled off.
Researchers found that: Users tend to aggregate in communities of interest, which causes reinforcement and fosters confirmation bias, segregation, and polarization. This comes at the expense of the quality of the information and leads to proliferation of biased narratives fomented by unsubstantiated rumours, mistrust, and paranoia.
Because users create these walled communities themselves - choosing to read only news that agrees with their biases, or unfriending people who challenge their socio-political views - there's not much Facebook (or anyone for that matter) can do to remedy the situation.
 Conspiracy theories, hoaxes and other variants of baloney have become so prevalent and intractable on Facebook that we no longer bother to debunk them.
But a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences provides some insight on exactly how misinformation spreads - with big implications for the fight against it.
The paper, titled: 'The spreading of misinformation online', comes from researchers at Boston University and several prominent Italian institutions. It draws on five years of posts from 67 public Facebook pages, roughly half devoted to conspiracy theories and half about science news, plus two unrelated pages that served as a control group.
They found that, in essence, conspiracy theories and hoaxes spread in a predictable, three-step pattern.

Step 1: An individual or page posts a piece of conspiracy news or information, introducing it to their social network. (think "0800sunnytourist"  :)  )
Step 2: That conspiracy is voluntarily shared and propagated by individuals who agree with the narrative - largely within the first two hours, but again at the 20-hour mark.
Step 3: The conspiracy gradually branches throughout the network over a period of days, its speed slowing but its audience growing continuously. Within a period of two weeks or so, the theory has been adopted by large portions of the community - and once they've been adopted, they're "highly resistant to correction".
In fact, as this group of researchers has found before, attempts to correct conspiracy theories often have the opposite effect: They make conspiracists grip their beliefs all the more strongly.

:P   so - you read it all now - the only question remaining is:  - do you have faith???







https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=12140755

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/technology/news/article.cfm?c_id=5&objectid=11571363




Have fun!