A look at the rise of the ambivalent conspiracy theorists, popular YouTubers using irony and nonchalance to refurbish old conspiracies for new audiences
Amanda Hess / New York Times : Tweets: @crackedscience , @mkonnikova , @notjessewalker , @nytimes , @skeptinquirer , @nytscience , and @robinhanson Tweets: Jonathan Jarry / @crackedscience : Very interesting piece by @amandahess for @nytimes about the rise of the “ambivalent conspiracy theorist” on YouTube. There seems to be a sort of apathy toward knowing what is true that I find disturbing.... https://www.nytimes.com/... Maria Konnikova / @mkonnikova : The internet “has made belief irrelevant. As soap operas have been supplanted by reality television and now YouTube vlogging, the line between fantasy & reality has become somewhat passé. Conspiracy theorizing is no longer stigmatized; it's just for fun.” https://www.nytimes.com/... Jesse Walker / @notjessewalker : The ironic style of conspiracism has been thriving for more than half a century, but the New York Times calls it a “new, casual mode of experiencing paranoia,” because why bother checking the historical record? https://www.nytimes.com/... @nytimes : “The internet's biggest stars are using irony and nonchalance to refurbish old conspiracies for new audiences, recycling them into new forms that help them persist in the cultural imagination,” writes @amandahess https://www.nytimes.com/... Skeptical / @skeptinquirer : Spreading Conspiracy Theories for Fun and Profit. New York Times profiles what you might call “soft conspiracy theorists,” folks who seem to really enjoy conspiracy theories about the Moon landing, but may or may not fully buy into it. https://www.nytimes.com/... @nytscience : They kinda want to believe that the Apollo 11 moon landing was maybe a hoax https://www.nytimes.com/... Robin Hanson / @robinhanson : “If the classic conspiracy theorist was said to be motivated by distrust of authority and a feeling of social powerlessness, the ambivalent one can be animated by an even simpler impulse: boredom.” https://www.nytimes.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Amanda Hess's piece lands midway through a year in which YouTube's moderation problem kept resurfacing: back in February, the Times reported that curbing misinformation on the platform may mean punishing some of its own stars, something YouTube had shown it could not broadly do even after a policy shift (YouTube's inability to punish its stars). Hess adds the harder wrinkle — creators who wrap old conspiracies in irony and nonchalance, so there is no clean claim for enforcement rules to catch.
The reporting also feeds a thread running through the rest of the corpus: Scientific American's argument that sharing-without-thinking has produced a "new world disorder" (misinformation exploiting our eagerness to share), and the dueling Epstein-death hashtags that showed how quickly ambiguous events get folded into conspiracy frames across the political spectrum (dueling Epstein hashtags).
First-order effects
- YouTube's enforcement dilemma deepens: a star trafficking in ironic conspiracy content gives moderators neither an explicit falsehood nor a clear violation, so the February problem — being unable to punish big creators — gets structurally harder rather than easier.
- For the YouTubers themselves, irony is insulation: deniability lets old conspiracies reach new audiences while keeping sponsorships and plausible distance from the fringe.
Second-order effects
- Fact-checking infrastructure loses its target — labels and corrections assume someone asserted something false, so platforms facing ambivalent creators are pushed toward blunter tools (demonetization, removal) whose collateral damage fuels exactly the media-credibility grievances seen later in the Slate Star Codex vs. NYT rift.
- Audiences trained on ambivalence treat truth-status as irrelevant to sharing, which is the mechanism Scientific American flags as the engine of the wider disorder — the share button outruns the verification layer.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, information consumption completes its shift from belief to engagement: Konnikova's quoted line about the internet making belief irrelevant points toward an ecosystem where moderation regimes built on true/false binaries misfire by design.
- That structural mismatch pressures platforms and regulators toward governance based on behavior and amplification rather than content claims — a redefinition of what 'misinformation' even means for enforcement purposes.
The trend: Conspiracy content is migrating from asserted falsehood to ironic, deniable formats, outpacing platform moderation systems built to catch claims.