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29 WINTER 2024 building guardrails to minimize AI being used for nefarious purposes like scamming people or inventing misinformation. Big tech, he says, "is starting to get this right." Just as banks have begun to crush identity theft with data, he notes that a number of videos he once showed his students as examples of 9/11 conspiracy theories are no longer on YouTube, operated by Alphabet, the parent company of Google, "and they're using mostly AI" to scrub them. "I can't find them anymore. I can search all day long, and they're just simply gone. I think in 10 or 20 years, between big tech companies and government regulation, it won't be the wild west anymore." At the same time, "I don't think conspiracy theories will ever go away completely, and frankly, I don't think they should," Arndt says. Among the "upsides" to allowing them, he says, is "they could turn out to be true," as did the early, widely pooh-poohed theory that the Nixon White House was behind the 1972 Watergate break-in. And to "wash them completely out of the system, you'd probably have to be totalitarian, which we're not. We live in a free-speech society. There ought to be room for legitimate questioning." D'Angelo notes that, in order to become widespread, conspiracy theories must go public, which exposes them to critical scrutiny. "Along the lines of dealing with bullies," that scrutiny, he believes, must be increasingly "strident" to counter the threat posed by disinformation. At the moment, "I think our culture is cornered by conspiracy theories, and one way to get through that is to attack with a certain stridency that still adheres to journalistic principles of verification," D'Angelo says. "An institutional response to an intractable set of irrational propositions is a good thing," he says. "It's something that matters, a bulwark for democracy. If we consider, rightly so, conspiracy theories to be a drain on democracy, institutional responses are necessary." Still, "journalism has its work cut out for it," and requires a citizenry armed with "news literacy and analyti- cal tools to be effective," says D'Angelo. Among his students who felt better equipped after the fall term was Joe Arocho, a third-year communication studies major. Arocho says he'd begun D'Angelo's class fairly credulous, willing to accept as true just about any assertion he came across on social media. "I wasn't big into news," he says, often tuning it out as just so much noise. But the class, he says, made him realize that "you have to go back to legacy sources" to verify dubious reports on social media, and gave him a framework for doing so. For example: After seeing videos claiming that pro-Palestinian protestors had "removed" an American flag from a pole at Harvard, Arocho says he dug deeper, and found a report in the Harvard Crimson refuting the claim; the protestors had instead cheered as the flag was lowered in the afternoon "consistent with daily routine." "If I feel like, 'is the journalist giving me an opinion here?'" Arocho says, "I have to go back and fact check that." ■ John T. Ward is a freelance writer based in Red Bank, New Jersey. Ong's hat in New Jersey's Pine Barrens Local lore: It's an abandoned town where Princeton physicists practiced interdimensional travel, and eventually built an egg to go to an alternate universe. The cracks: Joseph Matheny wrote this work of fiction that spiraled in the early days of the internet. QAnon State of affairs: Far-right belief that then-President Donald Trump was elected to save the world from the Deep State, a group of Satan worshippers who run a global sex trafficking ring. Began in 2017 with an anonymous social media post from "Q." Staying power: Nearly one in five Americans still follow the QAnon theories, even though Trump is no longer president. Prohibition poison Drinking the Kool-Aid: In the later years of Prohibition, it was said that the U.S. government encouraged manufacturers of industrial alcohol to add toxins to help prevent people from turning the product into moonshine. Truth is stranger than fiction: This turned out to be true. — Corinne Coakley '25 and Kara Pothier CONTINUED

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