Help end medical misogyny. Sign our petition.

Help end medical misogyny.
Sign our petition.

Sign the petition

Please or to access all these features

AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

How many people do you know who have been sucked down internet rabbit holes?

14 replies

Bawbagg · 18/06/2026 21:54

I know four full out and out and out David Icke/qanon believers.

But also several other people who say they have long covid in the absence of any medical findings who state they are getting their diagnosis and advice from online support groups. Also a number of people who multiple times a month make reference to unpleasant but not catastrophic childhood experiences, as explanation for why their lives are unfulfilled now, who also say they are having input from support groups. It's like they're stuck in the rumination stage.

Overall I'd say there are at least twelve people in my life who are displaying unhelpful thinking patterns directly attributable to online interaction.

Is this typical?

OP posts:
RoniaCheetah · 18/06/2026 21:54

That's a lot! For me it's just my mum.

Bawbagg · 18/06/2026 21:58

Sorry to hear that. It must be hard.

OP posts:
Darragon · 18/06/2026 22:04

Those “alternative” health infuencers who argue against mainstream medicine belong in jail because people are dying as a result of their advice. My mum fell down that rabbit hole and died of cancer.

BertieBotts · 18/06/2026 22:19

I know a few. I find there is quite an overlap with certain traits or characteristics. Essentially anybody who finds it difficult somehow to "fit in" to mainstream society seems vulnerable to it in a way. Some of the people I know who have got very heavily into things have had really awful life experiences in general and most people just don't understand and they can end up feeling quite isolated. I see it a lot with people who are ND as well. Not everyone, but there is an aspect of that vulnerability there and a lot of the conspiracy or alternative type groups are very practised at appealing to that kind of experience because they essentially present a very sensitive, understanding face and they have time for you and they listen and understand you.

I can also be a bit prone to it. I don't believe in alternative health or conspiracy theories but I can get a bit stuck in very "chronically online" thinking patterns and actively try to cut down my internet use when I notice it happening. Also looking at online spaces like snark forums which sort of gently poke fun at this kind of thing can be helpful as long as they aren't too bitchy about individuals.

The Channel 4 doc "The Anti-Vax Conspiracy" was brilliant at how it exposed a lot of this stuff and I think it was very sympathetic (absolutely harrowing documentary to watch though, fair warning). I won't link because TBH all the sites look dodgy, but you can find it online. It's now owned by BBC so they keep taking it down anyway.

Or the podcast "You're Wrong About" - their episode "The Anti-Vaccination Movement" - also really sensitively done, although less exploration of what leads people to be drawn into these ways of thinking.

Washingforweeks · 18/06/2026 22:26

I think there is a balance, not every ailment needs to be seen to by a dr and I think there is a lot to be said for merging natural remedies and modern day medicine- it’s not one or the other. People seem to think they have to pick a side

Bawbagg · 18/06/2026 22:44

@BertieBotts thanks, that's really helpful.

I do sometimes wonder if these first groups of people to fall are sort of canaries in the mineshaft and if we'll all fall eventually, one way or another.

I really never thought that I'd have people within my social circle who got sucked in but here we are. If it's happened to them it could perhaps happen to any of us, with sufficient time and internet access.

OP posts:
BertieBotts · 18/06/2026 23:39

No, I don't think ALL, although I do certainly agree it could happen to any of us and it probably helps to be aware of the possibility. Another interesting thing I read recently - Danny Wallace's book Somebody Told Me. He has some different examples of conspiracy thinking which target different groups of people.

From the amount of it I have observed - I got really interested in this a few years ago. It is all niche things, and if something gets too widely believed then it stops working so they tend to switch tack, because the draw of the whole thing is about being privy to a hidden bit of knowledge that most people aren't aware of. That itself seems to activate a kind of thinking loop which is very compelling. You see it in a minor way all the time over things which might well be true and we probably all feel this way from time to time, and the trouble is that it happens for things which are true as well as things which are nonsense. There is probably at least one divisive issue that you have an opinion on, and it's really hard not to feel morally superior to people with the opposite view. To take one example, it's quite likely that you believe lesbian and gay relationships are just as valid as heterosexual relationships, and feel that people who do not believe this are bigots and homophobes. I would agree with this, so I'm not saying it's a wrong position to hold! But it's one example of where we can inadvertantly feel superior over a group of people who hold a different view to ourselves.

What I do think the scary thing is which we probably are all falling for to an extent is that our news media and the stories we get about the world are SO shaped by algorithms and demographics now that two people can form a completely opposing view of what the reality of a situation is.

So just to take the covid vaccine as one example, you might have Mary seeing lots of news reports about covid deaths and anecdotally she happens to know one person who was seriously ill with it and her daughter works at the hospital and is really upset and worried about the situation, she is following every bit of advice to the letter and is pleased and relieved to be vaccinated ASAP, and everyone she knows who has received the vaccine is healthy and has no side effects apart from a sore arm, plus if they did get covid it seemed much milder.

But then John down the road hardly knows anyone who has caught covid, the people he does know who have caught it say it's like a mild cold, his social media is full of scepticism about the efficacy of masks and keep pointing out that the wording used is very doom-mongering and scary and wonders what they are trying to distract us from, one of his friends (a male in his 70s) gets the vaccine and shortly afterwards suffers a heart attack, which he recovers from but it gives them all a scare, and then more and more he is seeing reports online or on TV about people reporting adverse effects about the vaccine, he starts to feel that it must be risky and untested, whereas his experience of covid doesn't match up with the level of caution the guidelines are recommending. He decides not to get the vaccine and he follows only the minimum recommendations.

Two people living on the same street end up with a completely opposite view of what is highly likely to be the exact same reality, because their information sources are so split and they aren't moving in the same circles. Those are extreme polarised examples to give an idea, but the same kind of thing is happening in all kinds of areas, and the problem is that Mary will believe COVID was a serious health threat which could have killed her and feel that the vaccine was a reasonable safety precaution, whereas John will believe COVID was a load of fuss over nothing, it was never likely to harm him, and the vaccine was a reckless experiment on the public.

Because the circles we can receive information from are so large, both things can be true - probably in reality, both Mary and John's individual chance of dying from COVID or being harmed by the vaccine were extremely low. However, there was an increased risk to the population as a whole from COVID and the vaccines did have some side effects which weren't initially documented, so advice around who should take which one did change over time. Even though these adverse effects (from both the infection or the virus) were rare, almost the entire world was affected so the absolute numbers of people who died or were harmed by either the virus or the vaccine were big enough that you could look and find numerous examples for either or both.

This does not seem to be intuitive to us, it is like the way that we process risk and probability is calibrated for a much smaller circle, probably in reality, the way that we understand risk and probability instinctively relates more to a time when we would have only heard things through word of mouth, and so we learned about danger by directly witnessing it or hearing of it from somebody who we know personally or a local acquaintance or friend-of-a-friend. So if we come across an account of something which happened to hundreds of people, that in the context of a medieval village or ancient tribe would seem like a horrifically dangerous thing, like a massacre, plague, or forest fire, and it would make absolute sense to fear that event and take steps to warn people and protect against it. Yet something that happens to one person one time in 30 years is awful, but it's a freak event and probably not something you would worry about in general.

Something that happens to hundreds of people in a world of 9 billion population is much closer to a drop in the ocean freak event than it is a massacre by a local enemy, but we don't process danger that way. When we see stories online of something happening multiple times, we react as though that is happening in our own local circle, particularly when we don't have plenty of opposing safe experience to cancel it out (e.g. when we see reports of dozens of car accidents, but this is cancelled out by the fact we drive in a car every day and are not involved in an accident, this goes some way to dispel fear of car driving.)

So if you see reports that a vaccine is causing problems, and you don't know a lot of people who have taken the vaccine, it is logical to assume that it is more likely to be dangerous than safe. It's just that this is not the full set of information to make the judgement on. But we are all getting a slightly differently edited version of the facts of the world.

Beachdrift · 18/06/2026 23:44

When I say ‘I fell down an internet rabbit hole’, what I mean is ‘I got interested in a topic’, like early silent screen actresses, or Romanov impostors. Not ‘The royal family are lizards’, or ‘9/11 was a hoax’ or ‘immigrants are Targeting Our Women’.

XigDoop · 19/06/2026 01:44

I know someone who keeps going on about the 'great reset'.

I also stopped using twitter recently because musk bots kept going on about the kalergi plan. Horrible stuff.

Firetreev · 19/06/2026 05:59

I know a few. They're mostly people who don't have enough going on in their lives - they lack friends, hobbies, jobs etc. They are also people who fairly fancy themselves and have a bit of a chip on their shoulder. They think they're smarter than everyone else despite all the evidence to the contrary.

Marmaladelover · 19/06/2026 09:47

My son sadly . He doesn’t work and it’s stopping him from finding work tbh. Different things for a number of years but the similarities are he thinks he is saving the world or discovered some great dark secret about some leader.

You can’t reason with him and he is likely to cut you off until he needs more money than UC can provide . I have no idea how to deal with this .

cross posted with @Firetreev .
I know a few. They're mostly people who don't have enough going on in their lives - they lack friends, hobbies, jobs etc. They are also people who fairly fancy themselves and have a bit of a chip on their shoulder. They think they're smarter than everyone else despite all the evidence to the contrary”

Yes exactly it .

mumumental · 19/06/2026 09:48

Two. They’ve both gone a bit mad and one has been sectioned.

FckThisShit · 19/06/2026 09:49

My mum and brothers. We've been NC now for 7 years because of the affect it's had on them.

Pineapplewhip · 19/06/2026 09:59

Me! 🤣

When i was 16 I worked Sundays on a reception desk at a car dealership. The phone rang maybe 10 times in 6 hours and there were only a handful of customers to greet. I started googling aliens and got reading about all the different "types" of aliens, the men in Black and "ancient aliens". I never got all weird about it and started telling people about it. It was my private little obsession reserved from 10am-4pm every Sunday!

New posts on this thread. Refresh page
Swipe left for the next trending thread