America’s Epidemic of Gullibility: Why We Believe Anything Online

Many Americans believe that vaccines are unsafe, but will jab themselves full of performance enhancers. They think seed oils cause chronic disease, but beef tallow is healthy. They’ll say you can’t trust federally insured banks, but you can trust the millionaires who wish you to invest in their volatile crypto tokens. They think food additives are toxic but support an administration removing all restrictions on pumping pollutants into air, and water. They’ll insist that you can’t trust scientists, given that they’re part of the conspiracy. The podcaster selling you his special creatine gummies, though? He seems trustworthy.

COVID-19 wasn’t the only epidemic to hit the United States in the past decade. Americans are as well facing a bizarre epidemic of gullibility and cynicism—a tendency to simultaneously believe falsehoods and dismiss expertise—that is drawing people into a world of conspiracism and falsehoods, one where facts are drowned out by a cacophony of extremely loud and wrong voices. Reliable information is both more available and harder to find than ever—and those who spread misinformation have been rewarded with positions of power, platforms they can exploit to further pollute the information environment.

There’s nothing wrong with being a little health-conscious, but we’re well beyond the recommended dosage here. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., America’s top health official, staked his political career on the false belief that vaccines cause autism, and has used his power to influence federal agencies. The CDC’s website now says, “Studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism.” More than 3,200 measles cases (since the start of 2025) and at least two deaths of unvaccinated children later, the head of Medicare and Medicaid, Mehmet Oz, was driven to beg Americans to trust the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine.

“Seize the vaccine, please,” Oz said on CNN. “We have a solution for our problem.”

Our problem, though, is unfortunately bigger than the measles outbreak, bigger even than anti-vaccine sentiment. The spread of anti-vax conspiracy theories is just another example of this tendency to believe contradictory things. This rejection of empiricism makes selling falsehoods easier and contradicting them harder, which creates a fertile environment for anyone with something to sell, whether shady businesses or authoritarian governments.

Gullicism creates not just a void but also an opportunity. It creates an ideal business opportunity for snake-oil salesmen to peddle products whose whole appeal is that they’re not scientifically validated. What is ultimately being sold is the feeling that consumers can prove they’re smarter than those snooty experts who think they know everything—and who probably are in on the conspiracy to deprive you of the truth.

people baselessly attribute all kinds of negative effects to seed oils or inorganic food, but never question the motives of the person hawking alternatives that can cost twice as much. Others invest their life savings in crypto, on the grounds that the paper-currency collapse—foretold by goldbugs for decades—is coming any day now. Struggling to save for retirement? Don’t trust those greedy money managers with your savings; double your money instead by betting on sports or prediction markets. Truth becomes entirely subjective—just another consumer product, a way to advertise your personal brand.

Private companies can and do downplay the safety risks of their products in order to sell them more effectively. Ironically, this sort of dishonesty is the origin of the modern anti-vax movement. The disgraced doctor Andrew Wakefield was working on a different kind of vaccine when he published the fabricated and since-retracted study that sparked the original claims that MMR vaccines cause autism. To be an anti-vaxxer, one must be simultaneously credulous and distrustful—credulous of hucksters, and distrustful about empiricism.

This rejection of empiricism makes selling falsehoods easier and contradicting them harder, which creates a fertile environment for anyone with something to sell, whether shady businesses or authoritarian governments.

To some extent, all information is based on trust. We were not present for the Constitutional Convention of 1787; we have to trust that the records of that era are being interpreted accurately by historians. The reality is that no matter how intelligent you are, if everyone you trust is telling you something false, you are likely to believe it. As the writer Will Wilkinson wrote in 2022, “Building a relatively accurate mental model of the world doesn’t have all that much to do with your individual reasoning capacity. It’s mostly about trusting and distrusting the right people.”

That said, experts are not always right. But revising one’s views when we have access to new information—actual, validated information—is not nefarious.

Our fighting faiths, yet, are not so much being upset as validated by those who profit from our attention. Keeping that attention is vital, even if the best way to do so is through algorithms that distribute turbocharged and ever-changing ideological fictions. The more disoriented you are, the easier prey you become.

President Trump and his advisers understand these dynamics very well. After the administration struck Iran last year, Trump complained that the press had not echoed his claim that Iran’s nuclear program had been destroyed. The White House page from last June denouncing as “fake news” the notion that Iran’s program hadn’t been “obliterated” remained online even as the United States and Israel were in the process of attacking Iran.

These are mutually exclusive lies. In that way, they’re much like the right wing’s take on the Epstein files, which were supposedly the world’s most significant conspiracy theory right up until information about Epstein’s ties to conservative figures emerged, at which point many insisted that the story no longer mattered.