̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Conspiracy

Social media posts around solar geoengineering ‘spill over’ into conspiracy theories

sc604 — Tue, 28 Feb 2023 16:00:00 +0000

̽��ֱ��researchers analysed tweets 2009 and 2021 tagged with #geoengineering. They used a combination of natural language processing, deep learning and network analysis to explore how public emotions, perceptions and attitudes have changed over a 13-year period.

̽��ֱ��researchers found that there is a large amount of ‘spillover’ between geoengineering and conspiracy theories, especially around ‘chemtrails’, a conspiracy theory dating back to the 1990s. ̽��ֱ��researchers suggest that negative emotions related to geoengineering have a contagion effect, transcending regional boundaries and engaging with wider conspiracies. Their results are reported in the journal iScience.

As the climate crisis worsens, the search for solutions has accelerated. Some potential, albeit untested and controversial, solutions involve geoengineering, where various technologies could be used to alter weather or climate. Solar radiation management (SRM) is one hypothetical geoengineering solution where temperature rise might be addressed by reflecting some sunlight back into space. Possible forms this technology could take include cirrus cloud thinning or spraying aerosols into the stratosphere. But there are few, if any, opportunities for researchers to test these potential solutions.

“ ̽��ֱ��amount of funding that’s been made available for geoengineering research, and especially outdoor experiments, is tiny,” said first author Dr Ramit Debnath, Cambridge Zero Fellow at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge. “When you ask funders why this is, the reason often given is that the research is too controversial.”

“There are significant and well-founded concerns around geoengineering, but fundamentally we’re interested in furthering knowledge in this area,” said senior author Dr Shaun Fitzgerald, Director of the Centre for Climate Repair in Cambridge’s Department of Engineering. “In order to do that, we need to have more informed discussions. We don’t want to dismiss any concerns expressed on social media, but we do want to put them into context.”

“ ̽��ֱ��views expressed on social media don’t necessarily translate directly into wider public views, but there is still a lot we can learn by studying conversations that are happening,” said Debnath. “We wanted to know whether people who were tweeting about geoengineering were in fact, a vocal minority, and if so, what else are these people talking about?”

̽��ֱ��researchers analysed a large dataset of more than 800,000 English-language tweets sent in the 13-year period between 2009 and 2021. ̽��ֱ��researchers used natural language processing techniques to analyse the emotions expressed in the tweets and assigned each tweet a ‘toxicity score’. ̽��ֱ��researchers then conducted a network analysis to determine how tweets about geoengineering interact with other hashtag networks and conspiracy theories.

“ ̽��ֱ��chemtrail conspiracy theory is particularly popular among conspiracy theorists based in the United States, and our analysis found that tweets about chemtrails are the common link between geoengineering and conspiracies,” said Debnath. “Most of these tweets are sent by American users, but they spill over across regional and national boundaries.”

̽��ֱ��‘chemtrail’ conspiracy theory dates back to the 1990s. Believers in this patently false conspiracy allege that condensational trails (contrails) from aircraft are intentionally seeded with various chemical or biological compounds for nefarious purposes including population control or military testing. Those who believe the chemtrails conspiracy theory also allege that aircraft could be used for intentional weather and climate modification.

̽��ֱ��researchers say that the common link between the chemtrails conspiracy and conspiracy theories around geoengineering is the idea that bad actors are ‘weaponising’ the weather with chemicals.

Their analysis also showed that positive emotions rose on global and country scales following events related to SRM governance, and negative emotions increased following the announcement of SRM projects or experiments.

̽��ֱ��researchers say their work could help inform future discussions around SRM and other forms of geoengineering by putting social media discussions in context. “It’s a small echo chamber, but it’s quite a noisy one,” said Debnath.

While the controversy around geoengineering will continue on social media, the team says what they really need is quality data and research. “There are risks associated with geoengineering, but how do these compare with the risks of letting climate change continue unabated?” said Fitzgerald. “I worry that knowledge hasn’t progressed in this area. What happens if some rogue entity decides to go for a huge deployment of SRM, and people end up suffering because of it? This is why it’s so important to have informed discussions backed up by quality research.”

̽��ֱ��researchers say their study provides a data-driven glimpse into the structure of online climate misinformation that has a strong contagion effect, leading to strengthening of conspiracy theories in the public domain. Understanding such links with respect to climate action is critical for the design of counteraction strategies.

̽��ֱ��research was supported in part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Cambridge Centre for Climate Repair, Cambridge Zero and Quadrature Climate Foundation, and the Google Cloud Climate Innovation Challenge Award. This study is part of an ongoing project co-led by Dr Ramit Debnath with Cambridge Zero on improving public understanding of climate change.

Ramit Debnath will be speaking about climate change misinformation at the Cambridge Festival on 30th March.

Reference:
Ramit Debnath et al. ‘Conspiracy spillovers and geoengineering.’ iScience (2023). DOI: 10.1016/j.isci.2023.106166

Researchers from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge have analysed more than 800,000 tweets and found that negative emotions expressed about geoengineering – the idea that the climate can be altered using technology – can easily fall into conspiracy.

Milamai via Getty Images

Person using a smartphone

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

Yes

Brexit and Trump voters more likely to believe in conspiracy theories, survey study shows

fpjl2 — Fri, 23 Nov 2018 07:51:34 +0000

̽��ֱ��largest cross-national study ever conducted on conspiracy theories suggests that around a third of people in countries such as the UK and France think their governments are “hiding the truth” about immigration, and that voting for Brexit and Trump is associated with a wide range of conspiratorial beliefs – from science denial to takeover plots by Muslim migrants.

̽��ֱ��research, conducted as part of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s Conspiracy & Democracy project, and based on survey work from the YouGov-Cambridge centre, covers nine countries – US, Britain*, Poland, Italy, France, Germany, Portugal, Sweden, Hungary – and will be presented at a public launch in Cambridge on Friday 23 November.

According to project researcher Dr Hugo Leal, anti-immigration conspiracy theories have been “gaining ground” since the refugee crisis first came to prominence in 2015. “ ̽��ֱ��conspiratorial perception that governments are deliberately hiding the truth about levels of migration appears to be backed by a considerable portion of the population across much of Europe and the United States,” he said.

In Hungary, where controversial Prime Minister Viktor Orban is regularly accused of stoking anti-migrant sentiment, almost half of respondents (48%) believe their government is hiding the truth about immigration. Germany was the next highest (35%), with France (32%), Britain (30%) and Sweden (29%) also showing high percentages of this conspiracy among respondents, as well as a fifth (21%) of those in the United States.

Close to half of respondents who voted for Brexit (47%) and Trump (44%) believe their government is hiding the truth about immigration, compared with just 14% of Remain voters and 12% of Clinton voters.

̽��ֱ��researchers also set out to measure the extent of belief in a conspiracy theory known as ‘the great replacement’: the idea that Muslim immigration is part of a bigger plan to make Muslims the majority of a country’s population.

“Originally formulated in French far-right circles, the widespread belief in a supposedly outlandish nativist conspiracy theory known as the ‘great replacement’ is an important marker and predictor of the Trump and Brexit votes,” said Leal. Some 41% of Trump voters and 31% of Brexit voters subscribed to this theory, compared with 3% of Clinton voters and 6% of Remain voters.

Researchers also looked at a number of other popular conspiracy theories. Both Trump and Brexit voters were more likely to believe that climate change is a hoax, vaccines are harmful, and that a group of people “secretly control events and rule the world together”. “We found the existence of a conspiratorial worldview linking both electorates,” said Leal.

He describes the levels of science denial as an “alarming global trend”. In general, researchers found the idea that climate change is a hoax to be far more captivating for right-wing respondents, while scepticism about vaccines was less determined by “ideological affiliation”.

̽��ֱ��view that “the truth about the harmful effects of vaccines is being deliberately hidden from the public” ranged from lows of 10% in Britain to a startling quarter of the population – some 26% – in France.

̽��ֱ��conspiracy belief that a secret cabal “control events and rule the world together” varies significantly between European countries such as Portugal (42%) and Sweden (12%). Dr Hugo Drochon, also a researcher on the Leverhulme Trust-funded Conspiracy & Democracy project, suggests this has "public policy implications, because there are structural issues at play here too”.

“More unequal countries with a lower quality of democracy tend to display higher levels of belief in the world cabal, which suggests that conspiracy beliefs can also be addressed at a more ‘macro’ level,” said Drochon.

̽��ֱ��research team assessed the levels of “conspiracy scepticism” by looking at those who refuted every conspiratorial view in the study. Sweden had the healthiest levels of overall conspiracy scepticism, with 48% rejecting every conspiracy put to them. ̽��ֱ��UK also had a relatively strong 40% rejection of all conspiracies. Hungary had the lowest, with just 15% of people not taken in by any conspiracy theories.

Half of both Remain and Clinton voters were conspiracy sceptics, while 29% of Brexit voters and just 16% of Trump voters rejected all conspiracy theories.

̽��ֱ��question of trust, and which professions the public see as trustworthy, was also investigated by researchers. Government and big business came out worst across all countries included in the study. Roughly three-quarters of respondents in Italy, Portugal, Poland, Hungary and Britain say they distrusted government ministers and company CEOs. Distrust of journalists, trade unionists, senior officials of the EU, and religious leaders are also high in all surveyed countries.

Trust in academics, however, was still relatively high, standing at 57% in the US and 64% in Britain. “We hope these findings can provide incentive for academics to reclaim a more active role in the public sphere, particularly when it comes to illuminating the differences between verifiable truths and demonstrable falsehoods,” said Hugo Leal.

Apart from academics, only family and friends escape the general climate of distrust, with trust reaching levels between 80% and 90% in all countries. Leal argues that this might help explain the credibility assigned to “friend mediated” online social networks.

In all surveyed countries apart from Germany, about half the respondents got their news from social media, with Facebook the preferred platform followed by YouTube. Getting news from social media was less likely to be associated with complete scepticism of conspiracy theories – much less likely in countries such as the US and Italy.

Researchers found that consuming news from YouTube in particular was associated with the adoption of particular conspiratorial views, such as anti-vaccine beliefs in the US and climate change denial in Britain.

“A telling takeaway of the study is that conspiracy theories are, nowadays, mainstream rather than marginal beliefs,” said Leal. “These findings provide important clues to understanding the popularity of populist and nationalist parties contesting elections across much of the western world."

̽��ֱ��survey was conducted by YouGov during 13-23 August 2018, with a total sample size of 11,523 adults and results then weighted to be “representative of each market”.

* Northern Ireland was not included in the survey.

Latest research reveals the extent to which conspiracy theories have become “mainstream rather than marginal beliefs” across much of Europe and the US.

These findings provide important clues to understanding the popularity of populist and nationalist parties

Hugo Leal

Gage Skidmore

Donald Trump speaking at the 2014 Conservative Political Action Conference. Some 44% of Trump voters were found to believe their government is hiding the truth about immigration, according to researchers.

Yes

Licence type:

Attribution-ShareAlike

“Denial”: how to deal with a conspiracy theory in the era of ‘post-truth’

fpjl2 — Thu, 16 Feb 2017 12:06:12 +0000

I only have a very small part in the film Denial compared to those of David Irving (played by Timothy Spall), Richard Rampton QC (played by Tom Wilkinson), Anthony Julius (played by Andrew Scott), and Professor Deborah Lipstadt (played by Rachel Weisz), but I like to think it’s an important one. When Irving sued Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin, her publishers, in the High Court for libeling him by calling him a Holocaust denier and a falsifier of history, Julius, as her solicitor, decided to defend her by proving that what she had written about Irving was true.

He asked me to go through Irving’s books, articles and speeches and address the issues at the centre of the case. With the help of two of my PhD students, who also appear in the film, I spent 18 months doing just that, and writing a 740-page report that was put before the court. We demonstrated that he was indeed a Holocaust denier, who had claimed that there was no Nazi policy of exterminating the Jews, that 6 million did not die as a result of it, that gas chambers were not used to carry it out, and that the evidence on which historians relied was forged.

Irving lost the case comprehensively. When the case was heard before the High Court in the early months of 2000, Irving was unable to shake the foundations of my report or the conclusions of several other expert witnesses who presented evidence on the gas chambers at Auschwitz, on the planning and implementation of what the Nazis euphemistically called “the Final Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe”, and on Irving’s connections with far-right, neo-Nazi groups.

In the film, John Sessions plays me incisively and with vigor as I give my evidence from the witness box. True, he only speaks for three or four minutes, whereas in the actual trial I was cross-examined by Irving for 28 hours, spread over more than a week. But the brilliant screenplay by David Hare gets over the essential point, which is that Irving deliberately falsified the historical evidence to bring it into conformity with his prejudices, his Holocaust denial. If all the egregious errors in his historical writings had been the result of mere carelessness then their effect on his arguments would have been random. But they all went to support his denial of Hitler’s responsibility for the Holocaust, the absence of any Nazi plan, and the claim that gas chambers were not used to kill vast numbers of Jews; so therefore they could only have been the result of deliberate falsification.

Irving wanted to argue, as he did in his opening statement, that Deborah Lipstadt was part of a Jewish conspiracy to discredit him. ̽��ֱ��judge did not permit him, however, to pursue this line in his closing statement. ̽��ֱ��allegation was irrelevant to the actual subject of the trial, which was Lipstadt’s charge that Irving was a falsifier of history and a Holocaust denier. Shifting the ground of an argument from the issues to the person who has raised them is a standard tactic of conspiracy theorists. They should not be allowed to get away with it.

In the end, by substantiating the defence of truth and accuracy in Lipstadt’s defamatory allegations, it was proved by implication that these things that Irving denied actually did happen. It was a victory for historical investigation. Seventeen years later, that victory no longer seems quite so comprehensive or secure. True, Irving was discredited in the eyes of the historical profession, some of whose members had previously taken his research seriously as scholarship. He also lost access to the newspapers and the broadcast media, where he had up to that point sometimes been treated as an expert on Nazism and the Second World War.

But the case was heard before the era of social media. Facebook was founded in 2004 and Twitter two years later. ̽��ֱ��Internet and the World Wide Web were already in existence, though their use was still not very widespread. These new institutions have transformed the nature of communication, putting out vast masses of unedited, undigested, uncontrolled information and, more importantly, misinformation out into the public arena.

̽��ֱ��rapid and still largely unregulated spread of abusive ‘trolling’, the aggressive harassment of individuals through obscenities and even threats of violence and rape by social media, has introduced a new element venom into the public discourse. During and after the trial, I received a large number of abusive and obscene letters through the post from Irving’s supporters. I did not find them upsetting; they were uniformly stupid and many of them were semi-literate. I filed them away. Nobody ever saw any of them apart from those who wrote them, and myself, their recipient. But nowadays they would not be put into envelopes, they would go out there onto the Internet, via social media. This is a huge difference, and it’s degrading and defiling what should be a means of open and friendly communication, information and debate.

More importantly, however, while the trial, as it happened and as it is depicted in Denial, gave the stamp of the High Court, of the legal profession, of academic historians and political scientists, to the authenticity of the massive documentation that exists showing the Holocaust really happened, the emergence of social media and the proliferation of Holocaust-denying websites has allowed people who refuse to accept the facts to put their obnoxious opinions before the public as if they were statements of the truth.

What is at the core of Holocaust denial is of course anti-Semitism: in essence a vast and pernicious conspiracy theory that believes that there is a Jewish plot to convince the world that six million Jews were killed by the Nazis, and that the plot has only succeeded because ‘the Jews’ control the media and rule the world of academic historical research. This is of course utter nonsense, as we showed in court. Apart from anything else, Jewish communities everywhere are divided politically and socially, and the media and the newspapers are not controlled by Jews of any description acting in any kind of concert. Still less is this the case with universities and institutes of research that discover and publicize the huge mass of historical documentation now available on the Holocaust.

But all opinions are equal in the new public sphere of the Internet. And there is a new form of ‘soft’ Holocaust denial making itself heard: the suggestion that the mass murder of the Jews by the Nazis was just another genocide among many, however terrible it may have been. Anyone who has ever worked on Nazi Germany knows that this was not the case: while millions of others who were the victims of Nazism – ‘Slavs’, ‘Gypsies’, the mentally ill and handicapped, homosexuals, and others – were seen as obstacles to the rise of German power, the purity of the German race, and the implementation of German plans to colonise eastern Europe, the Jews were regarded quite differently, as the ‘world-enemy’, engaged in a global conspiracy that aimed at the destruction of the German, or as the Nazis put it, ‘Aryan’ race. They were an existential threat, so had to be killed wherever they were found. That is the reason why they were singled out by the Nazis, and even by ordinary German soldiers during the invasions of Poland and Russia in 1939 and then 1941, for specially sadistic and humiliating treatment, unlike the Nazis’ other victims.

̽��ֱ��‘Final Solution’ was thus far more than just another set of massacres. That is why we commemorate it on Holocaust Memorial Day, on 27 January. Yet when the Trump White House put out a statement on the Day, it made no mention of the Jews at all. Questioned on this, a spokesman claimed that the President wanted the Day to be ‘inclusive’. But the Nazis weren’t inclusive: it was only the Jews whom they tried to exterminate everywhere they found them, in their millions, in gas chambers, ghettoes and shooting pits. Seemingly the kind of anti-Semitism that reared its ugly head during the US election campaign, with Trump’s claim that Hillary Clinton “meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty” and that Jews “control the levers of power”, has now moved into the White House.

Hard and soft Holocaust denial are now back in business, thanks to the Internet and to social media. All we can do to counter them is to insist again and again on the facts. ̽��ֱ��release of Denial, I hope, has made and will continue to make a major contribution to the discrediting of these obnoxious and paranoid conspiracy theories.

This article was originally published by the Conspiracy & Democracy Project: a five-year, interdisciplinary research project at Cambridge aiming to provide a “natural history” of conspiracy theorising. Prof Sir Richard Evans (inset above) is a co-Director of the Project.

The new film Denial dramatises the landmark libel trial when David Irving sued the academic Deborah Lipstadt for calling him a Holocaust denier – a case Irving lost. Sir Richard Evans, Regius Professor of History and an authority on the Third Reich, was called as an expert witness in the trial. Here, Evans discusses the case and the film, the emergence of 'soft' Holocaust denial, and the statement put out by Trump's White House on this year's Holocaust Memorial Day.

There is a new form of ‘soft’ Holocaust denial making itself heard: the suggestion that the mass murder of the Jews by the Nazis was just another genocide among many, however terrible it may have been. Anyone who has ever worked on Nazi Germany knows that this was not the case

Richard Evans

Bleecker Street

Timothy Spall playing discredited historian David Irving in the film Denial.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Elvis is alive and the Moon landings were faked: the (conspiracy) theory of everything

sjr81 — Tue, 25 Oct 2016 08:14:52 +0000

Elvis is alive, the Moon landings were faked and members of the British Royal Family are shapeshifting lizards.

Not only that: 9/11 was an inside job, governments are deliberately concealing evidence of alien contact, and we are all being controlled by a sinister, shadowy cartel of political, financial and media elites who together form a New World Order.

As a global population we are awash with conspiracy theories. They have permeated every major event, across every level of society; from the French Revolution to the War on Terror. In doing so, they have attracted devotees in their millions; from lone survivalists to presidential nominees such as Donald Trump – who claimed Ted Cruz’s father had links to Lee Harvey Oswald and, by inference, to the murder of President John F. Kennedy.

But what effects do conspiracy theories really have on the public as we go about our day-to-day lives? Are they merely harmless flights of fancy propagated by those existing on the margins of society, or is their reach altogether more sinister? Do runaway conspiracy theories influence politicians, decision-makers and, by extension, the public at large? And what effect has the advent of the internet and mass, instant communication across social media platforms had on the spread of conspiracy theories around the world?

Since 2013, a team of Cambridge researchers and visiting fellows has been examining the theories and beliefs about conspiracies that have become such an enduring feature of modern society. Conspiracy and Democracy: History, Political Theory and Internet Research is a five-year, interdisciplinary research project based at CRASSH (Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities) and funded by the Leverhulme Trust.

̽��ֱ��project brings together historians, political theorists, philosophers, anthropologists and internet engineers as it seeks to understand what additional factors must be at work for conspiracy theories to enjoy such prevalence in the 21st century.

Professor John Naughton who, along with Professor Sir Richard Evans and Professor David Runciman, is one of the three project directors, explains: “Studying conspiracy theories provides opportunities for understanding how people make sense of the world and how societies function, as well as calling into question our basic trust in democratic societies.

“Our project examines how conspiracies and conspiracy theorising have changed over the centuries and what, if any, is the relationship between them? Have conspiracy theories appeared at particular moments in history, and why?

“We wanted to counter the standard academic narrative that conspiracy theories are beneath contempt. We were anxious to undertake a natural history of theorising, to study it seriously from a 21st-century context.”

Despite the onset of the digital age, Naughton and his colleagues do not believe that the internet has necessarily increased the influence of conspiracy theories on society as a whole. Indeed, research suggests that although the spread of conspiracy theories is often instantaneous in the digital world, so too is the evidence to debunk them.

Likewise, the team’s work so far suggests that online, as in life, we largely surround ourselves with people of like-minded views and opinions, effectively partitioning ourselves from a diversity of world views.

“ ̽��ֱ��internet doesn’t make conspiracy theories more persuasive, it actually seems to compartmentalise people,” adds Naughton. “We more efficiently come into contact with those who hold similar views, but we also mostly end up working in echo chambers. That’s the way the internet works at the moment – especially in social media: you end up somewhere where everyone has the same views.

“ ̽��ֱ��effect is a more concentrated grouping of opinions, and that’s the same for everything else, not just conspiracy theories. I follow 800 people on Twitter. Not one of them celebrated Brexit. I was in an echo chamber.”

Dr Alfred Moore, a postdoctoral researcher on the project, adds: “ ̽��ֱ��question of the effect of the internet is a really interesting one. How far can the emergence and success of today’s populist movements be explained in terms of technological changes and especially social media? My first instinct is to say a little bit, but probably not much.

“Technologies have made it less costly to communicate, which means it’s easier to find, talk to and organise supporters without the financial and organisational resources of political parties. Both Corbyn and Trump make heavy use of social media as an alternative to a supposedly biased ‘mainstream’ media and the influence of their parties. It also demonstrates how the internet can promote polarisation by making it easy for people to find information they agree with and to filter out everything else.”

For those reasons, Naughton and Moore believe that some of the most famous conspiracy theories – such as David Icke’s theories about shapeshifting reptiles or feverish claims about the death of Princess Diana – are not particularly dangerous as they don’t appear to generate tangible actions or outcomes in the real world. In fact, the Conspiracy and Democracy team question whether these silos effectively disable the capacity for many conspiracy theories to take a firm hold in the public consciousness or threaten our democratic processes.

“A lot remains to be done in researching the history, structure and dynamics of conspiracy theories, their relationships with real conspiracies, and the changes they have undergone through time,” adds Evans. “You might think that conspiracy theories cause anxiety and depression among ordinary people, and undermine trust in our political institutions and the people who run them, but there are plenty of other reasons for this lack of trust apart from conspiracy theories.

“ ̽��ֱ��debate goes on, but it’s not a case of conspiracy theories threatening democracies. By themselves, such theories may reinforce political suspicion and prejudice but they’re not the origin of it. On the whole, I think it’s fair to conclude that the scale of the threat is pretty limited.

“Some varieties, like antisemitism, can cause huge damage, but others are pretty harmless. Does it really matter that some people think the moon landings were faked? In the end, few people believe we are ruled by alien lizards.”

As a global population we are awash with conspiracy theories. But what effect do these really have on the public as we go about our day-to-day lives, asks a team of Cambridge researchers.

̽��ֱ��internet doesn’t make conspiracy theories more persuasive, it actually seems to compartmentalise people

John Naughton

Sebastian Bartoschek

Moon1

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Licence type:

Attribution-ShareAlike

Classic tales of intrigue and paranoia – coming to a cinema near you!

amb206 — Fri, 31 Jan 2014 16:00:00 +0000

Conspiracies and conspiracy theories lie at the heart of many great films. ̽��ֱ��plots of some of cinema’s most gripping narratives turn on secrets and lies, deception and collusion, revelation and exposure. Spy stories, political thrillers and horror movies are full of shadowy organisations, devious governments, criminal networks and evil masterminds in storylines skilfully crafted to tread a thin line between fact and fiction and to play with reality and imagination.

̽��ֱ��Conspiracy and Conspiracy Theory Film Season is an initiative of the Leverhulme-funded Conspiracy and Democracy research project, based at CRASSH (Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences), ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, in partnership with Cambridge Arts Picturehouse.

"We selected these five films because, through very different types of cinematic treatment, they expose the conspiratorial side of human relationships whether between groups or individuals,’ said Professor David Runciman, a political scientist at Cambridge and one of the project’s co-directors. "They’re great movies, too, that everyone should have a chance to see at least once, and understand more about. So we have an exciting line-up of speakers to give brief introductory talks before each film."

̽��ֱ��Manchurian Candidate (showing on Tuesday 11 February) is a political thriller based on the novel by the same name. Directed by John Frankenheimer, it was released in 1962 at the height of the Cuban missile crisis. ̽��ֱ��setting for the action is the Korean War and the narrative centres on brainwashing and assassination. Also released in the 1960s, the chilling Rosemary’s Baby (showing 18 February) directed by Roman Polanski is known as one of the all-time classics among psychological horror movies, featuring a heady mix of paranoia and satanism.

Starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford as journalists investigating the Watergate scandal, All ̽��ֱ��President’s Men (showing 25 February) proved a massive hit for the way in which it told the story of how a pair of conspiracy theorists brought down a president. A film that met with mixed reviews when it appeared in 1990, Hidden Agenda (showing on 4 March) is set in Northern Ireland and directed by Ken Loach. Through a fictional scenario, in which several characters are silenced by covert assassination, it looks at the possible role of British state terrorism during the Troubles.

̽��ֱ��series concludes with Alfred Hitchcock’s ̽��ֱ��39 Steps (showing 11 March), a thriller regarded as the best of the early films directed by the master of horror and suspense. It first hit the screens in 1935 and has been ranked by the British Film Institute as the fourth best British film of the 20^th century.

̽��ֱ��speakers who will introduce these five films include: David Trotter, King Edward VII Professor of English at Cambridge ̽��ֱ��; John Naughton, a columnist on the Observer; and Michael Newton, film writer for the Guardian.

Conspiracy and Democracy is an exciting five-year interdisciplinary project that brings together researchers from a wide range of fields to look at a phenomenon that has becoming increasingly pervasive and explore what it can tell us about how societies function in terms of trust and mistrust. ̽��ֱ��project is led by Professor Sir Richard J Evans (History), Professor John Naughton (CRASSH) and Professor David Runciman (Politics and International Studies).

All films start at 5.45pm with a 30-minute introductory talk. Standard prices and concessions apply plus student discounts of £6. Book at the Picturehouse Box Office or call 0871 902 5720.

For more information about this story contact Alexandra Buxton, Communications Office, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, amb206@admin.cam.ac.uk 01223 761673

Inset images: Rosemary's Baby, www.ronaldgrantarchive.com, Paramount Pictures; ̽��ֱ��Manchurian Candidate, www.ronaldgrantarchive.com, MC Productions.

Don’t miss the chance to see films that explore humankind’s capacity for deception. Showing at Cambridge Arts Picturehouse in February and March, each of the five movies screened as part of a Conspiracy and Conspiracy Theory Film Season will be introduced by an eminent speaker.

We selected these five films because, through very different types of cinematic treatment, they expose the conspiratorial side of human relationships whether between groups or individuals.

David Runciman

www.ronaldgrantarchive.com/Warner Bros

All the President's Men

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.

Yes