The Cost of Lies: Why We Identify With Deadly Misinformation
From Covid to climate change, understanding the role conspiracy theories fulfil for people's identity in a shifting world can better help explain our ‘post-truth’ age, writes Hardeep Matharu
Killing People
In the first wave of the Coronavirus pandemic in 2020, I interviewed an NHS nurse who told me that “people are being taken into hospitals and murdered”.
Those in her profession were running “death camps” that were “no different” to those of “the Third Reich”, Kate Shemirani said. “When I liken this to Auschwitz and the cattle trucks, you tell me the difference? I am science-led and I am law-led… I call it genocide”.
At the time, some criticised Byline TV for giving Shemirani ‘a platform’ for her conspiracy theories. When challenged on her outlandish claims, she called me a “special snowflake”. Admittedly, I found it difficult to know how to deal with such an interaction as a journalist. One viewer commented that I looked almost “frozen” while listening to her impenetrable monologues. The interview stayed with me for days afterwards. It was disturbing.
Byline TV decided to speak to Shemirani because, at the height of a public health emergency, her fringe views – and others like them – were spreading on social media. In the uncertainty and upset of lockdowns and socially-distanced deaths, people were in search of stabilisers. And Shemirani was already enjoying a platform that she used to speak directly to those questioning the chaos.
Legitimising her claims was, clearly, not the aim, but I wanted to hear what she had to say. Without bringing such conspiracist mindsets into wider view, and attempting to counter them, often to no avail, it is difficult to identify and understand what exactly is being claimed in the crevices of conspiracist social media communities – and why people are drawn towards them in the first place.
Often, the stock response to conspiracy mindsets like Kate Shermirani’s is ‘ignore them and they’ll go away’. But, if the past few years have taught us anything, these conspiracist social media communities have flourished regardless.
Having declared the pandemic to be a hoax and vaccines part of a plan to kill people, Shemirani was struck off as a nurse in 2021. Now branding herself as “the natural nurse”, she sells membership to her alternative health business.
For a time, her social media accounts were suspended over the promotion of misinformation. When Elon Musk took over the then Twitter, she was reinstated on what became X, as well as on Facebook.
“I see her as a public health issue rather than a close family relative” is how her son Sebastian Shemirani described his estranged relationship with his mother a year later when I interviewed him for Byline TV.
Arguing with her, according to Sebastian, simply had the effect of confirming – in her mind – that she was ‘right’. It was not only unhelpful to engage with her thinking, he said, but harmful: when presented with challenging facts, she would double-down.
In all the discussions of our ‘post-truth’ age and social media platforms pumping out disinformation and misinformation, it is easy to overlook the cost of it all amid the personalities of those promoting these ideas. But there is always a cost: often, bit by bit, to our shared sense of any sort of collective reality; and, sometimes, suddenly and fatally to those who pay the ultimate price.
In June, a BBC Panorama investigation revealed that 23-year-old Cambridge University graduate Paloma Shemirani had died after refusing treatment for cancer.
Told by doctors that she had a high chance of survival with chemotherapy, she was dead seven months later. She was the daughter of Kate Shemirani.
Her older brother Sebastian, and her twin brother Gabriel Shemirani, blame their mother’s anti-medicine conspiracy theories for their sister’s death last year.
Instead of the medical treatment recommended, Paloma tried ‘Gerson therapy’ – a strict plant-based diet, supplements, juices, and coffee enemas – which some claim, without medical evidence, can treat cancer. Her brothers say they believe Paloma refused medical treatment after being influenced by their mother’s beliefs, which they say Kate Shemirani used to coercively control her children’s lives and relationship with her.
Kate Shemirani told the BBC that she has evidence that “Paloma died as a result of medical interventions given without confirmed diagnosis or lawful consent”. She claims the NHS has engaged in a cover-up and that this is “one big massive manslaughter case”.
“Medicine is a lie and what we once believed to be healthcare is now a homicide service”, she wrote on X.
The Politics of Projection
The death of Paloma Shemirani would seem to suggest that ‘truth’ and reality are starkly different things in today’s world.
While we all now have our own ‘truths’ – highly-personalised and curated, just as the social media platforms that promote such a framework for making sense of the world encourage – there is a shared reality that plays out regardless of how we might want to individually spin it.
But beyond talk of fact-checking, cults, and social media regulation, one question is seldom asked: what is it about the age in which we live that makes evidence-free beliefs attractive to increasing numbers of people?
Beliefs ungrounded in evidence are not new – one only has to look at organised religion to understand the role such ideas can play in people’s lives. And as religion has declined in western societies, other belief systems have taken root. Even the most sceptical and atheistic of us have a narrative and a value system we believe in. A way to understand a world that is rapidly shifting around us. To make sense of who we are. To find some security about where we belong. Such beliefs, by their very nature, are often not primarily concerned with facts and evidence.
Social media, combined with a populist politics questioning an establishment that has presided over increasing levels of inequality and alienation, has provided a space for these beliefs to flourish today.
Professor J McKenzie Alexander’s work examines why some people are prone to evidence-free beliefs that become entrenched. I discussed the issue alongside him on a panel exploring the ‘future of truth’ at the 2025 LSE Festival in London in June.
The Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy, Logic, and Scientific Method at LSE – whose most recent book is The Open Society as an Enemy: A Critique of How Free Societies Turned Against Themselves – told the audience that “when people believe things which are mistaken, insufficiently evidenced, and so on, those beliefs aren’t inert”.
As in the case of Kate and Paloma Shemirani, those beliefs “often entail actions that people will take and will cause people to do things or to act in ways in society, to promote certain causes, that can create bad outcomes for other people”, he said. “And so opinions which are misinformed, or beliefs which are not grounded in the facts or the truth, actually can have great negative social consequences”.
The academic said he is concerned that our present moment “actually encourages people to have beliefs which are not necessarily grounded in fact”.
He explained: “Why is that? Well, if you think about what beliefs do, quite often, they serve as signifiers of the group that people belong to, and those beliefs – with this social signaling function – can cause people to believe things which may not be grounded in evidence, simply because that is an indicator of the group of which they’re a part.
“I think it’s interesting that, when you look at the US context, something like 25-30% of Republicans believe some or all of the QAnon conspiracy theory. Now, you have to ask yourself why might that be? Given this, I think that we have to think about the social consequences of beliefs that are insufficiently grounded in the facts. Think about why they are so useful, from a social point of view, to persist. And what we might try to do as a society in order to combat them.”
He cited the 2016 election of Donald Trump and the EU Referendum as two examples in a political context of when psychologically-shaped beliefs, not rational decision-making, have been the basis of outcomes that ‘shocked’ the established system.
“Donald Trump’s absolute genius [was] running for office on the slogan ‘Make America Great Again’,” Prof Alexander said at the LSE Festival. “If you give a speech and you say ‘I’m going to make America great again’ to an audience of 50,000 people, and they all cheer, what are they actually agreeing upon? It’s unclear, because each person could have their own conceptual understanding of what it means to ‘Make America Great Again’.
“In my book, I call these types of concepts Rorschach concepts because, like the Rorschach test [developed in the 1920s by psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Hermann Rorschach], it’s essentially the meaning as a projection by people onto what is being talked about.”
When it came to the Brexit Referendum, “the question that people were asked to vote on was whether or not the UK should stay in the European Union. The thing that’s difficult about that question is that staying in the European Union was the status quo – that was a fact that everyone knew. But, when it came to leaving the European Union, there wasn’t actually a concrete alternative”.
“Basically, every person was able to treat that question as a blank slate upon which they could project whatever idealised understanding they had about the world that was to come,” he added.
Identity Markers Versus ‘Tables and Chairs’
Different types of beliefs play distinct roles in how people live their daily lives. Without understanding this, it is hard to make sense of why some are drawn to bizarre-sounding theories that claim, with cast-iron certainty, to explain what is ‘really’ going on around us.
“Sometimes, they can just be vehicles of information and mention reason and evidence,” according to Prof Alexander. “But sometimes, beliefs can also take on a second function and try to address certain sociological aspects that people need to try to help them make sense of their place in the world and the reality in which they find themselves”.
While the ‘manosphere’ is another area rife with unfounded theories about a global feminist conspiracy against men – with real-life consequences – such “epistemically closed communities where people believe false or dangerous things in ways that don’t seem to be responsive to evidence” can, in part, be explained by the notion that this is a way “people can make sense of the world around them and try to understand their place in it, even if the beliefs that they use to do that aren’t actually factually grounded”, Prof Alexander told the LSE Festival.
“If you think about some of the communities, like the incels (‘involuntary celibates’) who have a set of dangerous sociological beliefs about how they understand the world around them, those beliefs provide a way for them to make sense of the situation in which they find themselves,” he said.
These beliefs based on misinformation can easily be held by people because “they actually have relatively few implications on their day-to-day life”.
“The number of things that people actually have to believe that are really true are pretty small and amount to hyper-specific local knowledge – like how do you cross the street without getting run over?” Prof Alexander said.
Coupled with this, the ‘attention economy’ driven by tech algorithms provides “a powerful incentive for disinformation to spread, because what keeps people’s attention on social media is not necessarily going to be strictly correlated with things that are true or well-grounded in evidence”.
For these reasons, he is pessimistic about the prospect of change, telling the LSE Festival that “it’s going to be quite challenging to turn it around”.
The climate crisis is an issue that starkly illustrates the point – a literally existential problem requiring a collective response which raises questions about people’s individual values systems that can vary widely.
“Apportioning one’s beliefs in line with the evidence makes most sense when you’re talking about, say, beliefs that are related to the natural world, physical reality, tables and chairs, and things that it makes sense to talk about as true beliefs that are grounded in facts,” Prof Alexander said.
“Where things get more complicated is when we think about the social world, social reality and norms and practices, and the values and the aims that we’re all trying to see realised in society. Those aren’t amenable to evidence in the same sort of way that a physicist would go about trying to answer questions. This becomes a much more collective effort in how we socially construct our values and our beliefs and, I think in that framework, it becomes a lot harder to think about what the relationship is between evidence and belief. This is an area where maybe there is an open question about whether it does make sense to talk about ‘truth’ as much when we think about the nature of social reality.
“Whether or not climate change is happening is certainly in the same realm as facts about tables and chairs, as is whether or not it’s anthropogenic or not. Now, the question is what do we do in response to that? Is this something that falls within the realm of social values and the construction of what it is that we want to try to see realised?
“People have different value bases which recommend different responses – all the way from net zero and a green new deal, to those who would be perfectly happy to have humans go extinct (because we’re the largest source of threat to the natural world that exists). Which one of those two options you opt for is going to depend on your moral values, which are not responsive to evidence in the way that beliefs about physical reality are.”
Policy-makers and campaigners need to understand and work with “people’s objections to making changes that are going to affect their lives – which they feel will be detrimental when they already have so much on their plate with the cost of living etc.”.
“I think the difficulty with climate change is that, whereas it has been based on ‘facts, facts, facts’ for such a long time, it’s very difficult to motivate people to act from facts alone – you need an emotional connection to do that,” Prof Alexander added. “The philosopher John Broome described climate change as the hardest problem humanity has ever had to face, because it seems structurally designed to leverage every kind of bad cognitive bias we have to get us to do the wrong thing.”
The Repressed Spirituality of Our Age
In a time of immense change, abstract notions of ‘the truth’ are not always comforting. What can they help us with? People need practical ways of understanding, coping with, and distracting themselves from their realities. And when our systems of governance seem to offer few solutions, they – rightly – start to question things.
It is these psychological and sociological forces that social media and populist politicians harness for their own ends – not with rationality, but by aiming to meet the more emotional and spiritual human needs that people have, but which our modern systems of politics and journalism do not speak to.
Since the 1980s, social democracy has become entwined with economic growth and, in turn, inequality. It is the capitalist instinct that dominates and this isn’t confined to politics – it has bled into our social and cultural life. Libertarian notions of market ‘freedoms’ are hard to reconcile with the constricted circumstances many find themselves trapped in day-to-day. We are not people but citizens/voters/consumers.
How are our more human needs for recognition, to be heard, to belong, to feel secure, being met in our 21st Century world?
“The reason why concern for truth doesn’t dominate in the reasoning process” of those who hold onto unevidenced beliefs, according to Prof Alexander, “is because that’s not what is actually relevant for the person trying to make sense of the reality in which they find themselves”.
“Addressing real psychological and sociological needs is something that those kinds of false, misinformed beliefs are doing,” he said on our panel at the LSE Festival. “And when we recognise that, we recognise that if we are concerned about false, misleading beliefs, we actually need to try to tackle the underlying social problems, like alienation, that people are actually grappling with and they’re using these false beliefs to try to deal with.”
When I spoke to Sebastian Shemirani in 2021, he said his mother’s beliefs had evolved over a 10-year period to a point “where, all of a sudden, everything has an alternative explanation… It got really spiritual, rather than just your standard conspiracy theory beliefs”.
That people are looking for something “really spiritual” should not surprise us. But the cost of the alternative answers to our dehumanising society that they are landing on should be a cause for alarm when we remember the future Paloma Shemirani will never live.
Hardeep Matharu is the Editor-in-Chief of Byline Times
I do think those actually peddling conspiracy theories are often monetising them, making them less likely to stop down and often they radicalise themselves not to mention their followers in the process since it’s all clickbait. There are so many conspiracy theories now. I’ve just read James Bloodworth’s Lost Boys about the manosphere. An industry in itself. When I saw your interview with Shemirani I thought in her case she seemed like a ‘true believer’, almost beyond help. I felt sorry for her son but my God her daughter?
Excellent article. Thank you.