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The climate lockdown conspiracies claim that a clandestine group of elites are planning to use climate change as a justification to enact widespread lockdowns and curtail freedoms. This conspiracy draws on a wide range of unconnected real-world events and suggests that their possibility of happening again is all the proof required.

As misinformation and disinformation spread more rapidly and widely than ever before, individuals have been encouraged to be critical consumers of all received information. At the heart of this point of contention is the question of where responsibility and fault should lie.

This essay explores the historical process by which the birth and expansion of information systems transformed the relationship between “faith” and “fact.” The existence of recurring forms of credulity and conversely denial—from holocaust denial to climate change denial—suggests that patterns of belief and disbelief will not be easily resolved either with fact-checking or with the regulation of the press.