"These are, I should stress again, a bunch of nice, thoughtful people.... I should stress again that these are smart people...."

"And they followed the deep partisan grooves of contemporary politics, in which liberals believed the absolute worst of a Trump supporter. But they also contained a thread of real conspiracy thinking — not just that racism is a source of Trumpian politics, but that apparently ordinary people are communicating through secret signals."

From "I’ll Take 'White Supremacist Hand Gestures' for $1,000/How hundreds of 'Jeopardy!' contestants talked themselves into a baseless conspiracy theory — and won’t be talked out of it" by Ben Smith (NYT).

"Alarming revelations of threats to the Capitol and members of Congress prompted House Democratic leaders to wrap up their legislative work for the week on Wednesday night...."

"The immediate threat is intelligence related to a possible plot by a militia group to attack the Capitol on Thursday. Followers of the QAnon conspiracy theory believe former President Trump will be reinaugurated on March 4, a traditional date for presidential inaugurations until 1933...."  

MSN News reports.

How much evidence of a possible attack was there? Is vacating the building the right response to whatever this was? I presume it was something more than just people spinning theories that focused on a date that happens to have historical significance, but only the House is abandoning its workplace, not the Senate.

"Folks delaying seeking care or, taking the most extreme case, somebody drinking bleach as a result of structural factors just underlines the fact that we have not protected the public from disinformation."

A sentence fragment from a doctor quoted in the NBC News article "'What are we doing this for?': Doctors are fed up with conspiracies ravaging ERs/'I left work and I felt so deflated,' one doctor said about an effort to counter misinformation he saw on Facebook. 'I let it get to me.'"

What did he mean by "structural factors" — in "drinking bleach as a result of structural factors"? NBC attempts to inject coherence into the doctor's statement:

The structural factors in this case include Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, which have struggled to contain the spread of misinformation, some of it coming from positions of authority.

I found this article frustrating, because it's written in this impressionistic style that begins in the middle of things with a fed-up doctor expressing his frustration as he encounters one guy on Facebook ("a man insisting to him that 'no one's dying' and that the coronavirus is 'fake news' drummed up by the news media").

Yes, bad info on Facebook and the blowhards who pass it on are a problem, but when I turn to mainstream media for the news, I want factual information, clearly stated. So if NBC wants to do an article about coronavirus conspiracy theories in social media, I expect it to be easy for me to look at the article and see what the conspiracy theories are and how prevalent they are in social media. Not just what one guy said that annoyed another guy!

Look at that headline. It says we're going to get you anxious and excited about people you're expected to care about who've got their emotions stirred up. Yes, that did get me emotional. The emotion was annoyance that the professional news media does not give me a straight factual story!

It's like they want to get in on the conspiracy theory action by puffing up theories about theories.