From the EDITOR...

Apparently there has been a ‘startling’ rise in the number of people who believe the Earth is flat, so much so, there has been a special investigation into the phenomena.

Those researchers now believe they have identified the prime driver for this upsurge – YouTube.

UK-based The Guardian newspaper reported that researchers’ suspicions were aroused when they attended the world’s largest gatherings of Flat Earthers at the movement’s annual conference in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 2017, and then in Denver, Colorado, last year.

Interviewing attendees as to their belief, the researchers found a pattern in how these people came to believe the Earth was a large flat disc, rather than a ball, and this was from watching items on YouTube.  The researchers were further intrigued that it only took YouTube to convert previous sceptics. Such is the power of social media.  Of the 30 interviewed, all but one said they had not considered the Earth to be flat two years ago but changed their minds after watching videos promoting conspiracy theories on YouTube. The most popular site was Eric Dubay’s ‘200 Proofs Earth is Not a Spinning Ball’. Some said they watched the videos only in order to debunk them but soon found themselves won over by the material.

The good news is – unless you are a Flat Earther – the only Flat Earth engineers believe in is the flat earth model used as an approximation when the distances/scale/accuracy/precision they are working with means that the curvature of the Earth can be neglected.

‘The only tool we have to battle misinformation is to try and overwhelm it with better information.’ - Prof Asheley Landrum, Texas Tech University, researcher.