A middle school teacher who goes by the name Ms. Alexander has shared the bizarre conspiracy theories that her 6th grade students believe in and what fostered their beliefs. While she wasn’t surprised by a couple of them, the remainder left her shocked. Studies have shown that there’s a link between the rise of social media and the increase of misinformation that leads younger generations to believe in conspiracy theories. In 2023, researchers at the University of Louisville in Kentucky published a study that revealed that 60% of teens ages 13-17 agreed with at least 4 conspiracy theories. With the rise of artificial intelligence, it’s concerning that those statistics will likely increase.
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| BILL NYE IS A RUSSIAN SPY: 6th graders believe that Bill Nye, an acclaimed scientist who hosts the PBS series Bill Nye the Science guy, works with a Russian operative named Natasha to steal classified scientific breakthrough documents from the U.S. government. There is, of course, no evidence that this theory is true. |
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BIRDS ARE NOT REAL: This conspiracy theory has been popular for years and has even popped up on large billboards in Pittsburgh, Memphis and Los Angeles. The theory claims that what appear to be birds are actually drone replicas created by the U.S. government to spy on Americans.
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MICHAEL JACKSON IS STILL ALIVE: Singer Michael Jackson died from cardiac arrest in 2009, but that doesn’t stop 6th graders from believing that the King of Pop is still alive. This may stem from a video that referenced Jackson’s family seeming calm at his funeral, claiming that a hidden tunnel was found under P. Diddy’s house that only Jackson knew about, and the the FBI recently found clues suggesting Jackson could be alive and hiding in that building.
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| THANKSGIVING WAS ONLY MADE SO AMERICA COULD HAVE A HOLIDAY IN EACH MONTH: Apparently, there are those who believe that the story between the pilgrims and the Native Americans was fabricated and that there’s no proof that the pilgrims invited the Native Americans to share a meal. Instead, a positive and happy Thanksgiving story of the Native Americans and colonizers breaking bread was fabricated to gloss over the violence and exploitation that occurred. This is a theory shared by the Potawatomi tribe who said that Thanksgiving when President Abraham Lincoln officially established the holiday during the Civil War in 1863, it was really meant as a way to improve relations between the northern and southern states and tribal nations. Dr. Kelli Mosteller, Director of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation’s Cultural Heritage Center said in 2020 that this was merely propaganda to try and build an event so that you could have a deeper narrative about community building and coming together. |
