in Popular videos now, a woman approached two correspondents, asked them if they worked for the NHS, and berated them when they replied they did not. She asked one of the men if she had any children or parents, and when she was told that she had a mother, she replied: “Well, when they turn it on, bye-bye, Mom.”
The “switch” she’s talking about is 5G.
Suddenly, there is panic surrounding the latest generation of mobile communications infrastructure, 5G, and the idea that it is the real cause of the coronavirus pandemic seems to be spreading everywhere. There have been suspected arson attacks on mobile phone masts in Birmingham, Liverpool and Merseyside in recent days. Celebrities are pushing the idea that 5G is harmful and linked to Covid-19. Michael Gove has branded the theory “dangerous nonsense” and the government is being forced to address concerns.
Let me be clear: these theories are wrong. As you can see from the fact checks linked throughout this article, there is no link between 5G and the coronavirus, and there is no evidence of any health risks from 5G. But it’s not clear that simply dismissing them is the right approach. Given the havoc the coronavirus pandemic has caused, it’s understandable that people are worried and looking for answers. And in order to successfully answer them, we need to understand where these theories come from.
Because while the idea that 5G is harmful may seem to have exploded out of nowhere during the coronavirus pandemic, it has actually been steadily building online for years. Because I came. And its origins can be traced even further back to the panic surrounding early generations of cell phones and wireless technology in the early 2000s.
If you want to understand the panic around 5G during the pandemic, you need to understand how we got here.
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Myths about 5G were circulating even before the coronavirus
The alleged arson attack on a telephone tower may be alarming, especially at a time when the country is more reliant than ever on communications technology, but it is the first time that misinformation has led to vandalism. isn’t it. In 2018, a man climbed a lamppost in Gateshead to remove what he believed to be a 5G antenna. And the vandalism of telephone towers in general goes back even further than that.
At Full Fact, we’ve been researching and writing about 5G conspiracy theories for the past year. Last May, we wrote about images of men in protective gear working on cell phone towers. It almost certainly shows him cleaning the tower, rather than donning a hazmat suit and installing his 5G.
Last year, a post claimed that 5G is harmful because the signal is stronger than its predecessors (4G and 3G), so 5G must be dangerous to life (which the poster believed) tend to be based on the belief that A common theme is 5G “towers” causing the death of large flocks of birds, largely stemming from the incident in The Hague in October 2018, when nearly 300 dead starlings were found in a park. . (There were no 5G tests conducted in surrounding cities.) So did vocalists in the anti-5G community when hundreds of starlings were found dead on a north Wales road in December 2019. made accusations.
In reality, mass bird deaths are not uncommon (even before 5G technology), and the UK government monitors birds to check for disease outbreaks.
It wasn’t just the birds. The claim that 5G is dangerous to human health is also supported by supposed examples of harm to trees. This has led to a new theory that authorities were cutting down trees to hide the fact that 5G would kill them. We also saw the proliferation of official-looking signs attached to infrastructure and overlapping concerns with smart street lights, baby monitors, microwave ovens, and smart meters.
Former TV host turned conspiracy theorist David Icke was an early celebrity proponent of the 5G conspiracy theory, first mentioning the technology to his hundreds of thousands of Facebook followers in mid-2018. But one of the key successes of 5G rumors is how it has been able to penetrate so many online communities.
The anti-vaccine community has often accepted the idea that 5G is harmful. These groups often operate through a series of linked accounts on Instagram, and overlap with alternative health and nutrition accounts that advocate things like alkaline diets. They tend to be skeptical of modern medicine and what they see as over-medication, and some of their work overlaps with mainstream wellness content, such as Gwyneth Paltrow’s “Goop.”
But we’ve also seen traditionally opposed groups adopting similar anti-5G rhetoric. In 2019, EE announced that it would be trialling 5G at Glastonbury that year. Before the festival began, Glastonbury’s Green Party majority council, along with several other town councils, voted against the rollout of 5G in the town. At the other end of the spectrum, climate change skeptics told festival-goers they were paying to be human guinea pigs.
Running through these claims seems to be a genuine concern that we have been fooled about in the past when it comes to public health issues. Some people point to thalidomide and asbestos as reasons not to trust government guidance on public health issues. Some people believe that 5G should not be used because it has not been explicitly “tested” on humans. Mainstream British publishers were also guilty of uncritically reporting on these conspiracy theories long before the pandemic.
We are fueled by the belief that there is a “5G wave” that will change and boil water, cause cancer and mental health problems, and that ultimately radiation has no safe limits. I’ve seen claims that it is. And this is a belief that goes back to a time when his 5G was barely visible in the eyes of the telecom industry.
These fears have a long history
All of these arguments may be familiar to those who witnessed protests in the early to mid-1990s against the rollout of 3G, then called “mobile broadband.” Protests around 3G base stations have occurred semi-regularly in the UK, usually when the base stations are located near schools or in residential areas. As already mentioned, this sometimes extended to acts of vandalism against the mast. Despite government advice and evidence at the time, their reasoning was mainly about cancer risk and lack of testing. It was related to his similar overlapping fears about the proliferation of Wi-Fi around the same time.
Some engineers were skeptical.[changing] While pretending to do some maintenance, I connected to 3G across the box on the existing mast without telling anyone. ” We see similar claims being made regarding the rollout of 5G during today’s lockdown.
And before people worried about the internet on their phones, they were worried about the phones themselves. As with 5G, officials focused on radiation harm. Cell phones, then and now, transmit radio waves on the non-ionizing end of the electromagnetic spectrum. This means that they cannot damage DNA like X-rays or gamma rays can.
5G meets coronavirus
Conspiracy theories about 5G and the coronavirus pandemic quickly gained public attention in early April, but have been spreading online for months. The link between claims about 5G and the coronavirus began to emerge in late January, shortly after the virus began receiving heavy coverage in the UK media, but before the outbreak was declared a pandemic.
But one thing that’s important to realize is that there is no single “5G conspiracy theory.” Instead, multiple theories exist, which sometimes overlap, but also contradict each other. If you look at some of the big anti-5G groups on Facebook, you’ll see arguments that the virus is the real cause of the disease, but that 5G is making the situation worse and that the virus is not the cause of the disease. I understand. This disease and all the symptoms are actually caused by 5G, there is no disease at all, and this outbreak is a huge attempt by the government to install his 5G under the cover of lockdown. It’s a fabrication.
Early posts in January largely fell into the first camp, claiming that 5G threatened human health and weakened the immune system, while claiming that the new virus was just a more virulent version of the common cold. also added.
From what we have seen so far, as the pandemic has accelerated and the measures restricting people’s freedoms in the UK have become more extreme, so too have claims.
Telecommunications engineers continued to work as key workers when lockdown measures were introduced in the UK. Some were filmed doing this, and the new infrastructure was used as evidence that the government was hiding something. For this faction, 5G is not causing the symptoms of COVID-19, but is currently being used as a distraction by the government, so 5G could be rolled out across the country without delay. Some say the virus was created in a lab, others say it was an entirely different disease, or that there was never an outbreak at all. Other posts made outlandish claims about vaccines that hadn’t been invented yet. One of the most common claims we saw was that the design of his new £20 note contained his secret message about 5G and coronavirus.
Another leading theory is that the symptoms of COVID-19 were actually “mass damage” from 5G. Some promoters of this theory deny basic medical facts by claiming that you cannot “get the virus.” Of course, there are multiple respiratory illnesses that are caused by viruses and spread through coughs and sneezes.
One of the first 5G and coronavirus claims we saw was that 5G was to blame for the disease outbreak in Wuhan. However, it has resurfaced with claims that COVID-19 hotspots are also covered by 5G and that cases on cruise ships can be explained as follows. The radiation emitting technology used in them. (It is worth noting that there is no 5G in Iran, one of the countries with the earliest severe coronavirus outbreaks.)Demonstrators at last year’s Hong Kong protests Videos of streetlights being pulled down were used by some as a symbol. People in China are “destroying 5G power poles because they recognize that they are triggering the coronavirus syndrome.”
While claims about 5G were a relatively small part of our work before the pandemic, they now contribute to a significant number of both the fact-checking requests we receive from readers and the content we see on social media. I am. In a matter of weeks, we watched posts about 5G go from niche corners of the internet to some full-blown conspiracy theories, endorsed by celebrities and crystallized around the world’s biggest news stories. I saw it.
The government’s official answers to questions about 5G are based on Public Health England advice and primarily take guidelines from the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection, and there is no evidence that exposures above these guidelines are harmful. It is said that there was no such thing.
A report last year into Facebook’s third-party fact-checking program warned that there was a clear lack of official guidance to adequately address public concerns about the rollout of 5G in the UK. the government, Admitted While 5G misinformation is clearly a problem, improved public health information about 5G safety would have been welcome before the crisis.
We’ve also seen media outlets that we previously called on to correct misleading headlines about 5G and the coronavirus call out the people who took down phone towers like idiots.
Businesses need to learn lessons from this too. Companies that introduce changes that cause concern need to effectively reassure people. This would have been much easier if the concerns had not been more widespread, and the cost to the telecom industry to do it effectively would have been much lower than the cost it now faces for failing to advocate for it. .
Simply asking internet companies to remove this content is not an appropriate response in a free society, is unlikely to work, and may even make matters worse.
In the midst of a public health crisis, when the normal operation of society is upended, it’s no surprise that people’s instincts about what’s real and what’s fake may become warped. . It’s no surprise that people are scared, stressed and confused, and we need to take that into account in all our responses. Not everyone is convinced. Some people like conspiracy theories, and some people may not be convinced by facts. However, as concerns surrounding 5G become mainstream, rather than simply dismissing these arguments as nonsense, we need to counter them head-on with clear, high-quality information and persuade those with questions and concerns. That is the responsibility of all of us.
