Did YouTube flatten the Earth?

Beyond Today

BBC

News

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 16 July 2019

⏱️ 20 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today marks exactly 50 years since the launch of the Apollo 11 mission to put the first man on the Moon. Ever since that day in 1969 conspiracy theories have sprung up alleging that the whole thing is a hoax, and now there is a growing community of people who don’t even believe the earth is round. In this episode, Marco Silva, a reporter for BBC Trending introduces us to Dave from Sheffield, a man who is convinced that the earth is flat. He is part of a group whose false ideas have spread with the help of the YouTube algorithm. We learn about the people trying to address the misinformation problem and what YouTube is doing about conspiracy theories on its platform. If you want to know how dangerous medical misinformation can be spread by health bloggers, you can listen to our anti-vax episode here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p072rpnk Producers: Lucy Hancock and Alicia Burrell Editor: John Shields

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts.
0:05.6	Hello, I'm Tina Dehealy.
0:07.6	Welcome to Beyond Today from BBC Radio 4, a space to ask one big question about one big story.
0:14.0	Today, did YouTube flatten the earth? 12, 11, 10, 9, ignition sequence starts.
0:37.0	Today marks exactly 50 years since Apollo launched its mission to the Moon.
0:44.0	Zero, all engine running.
0:47.0	Lipto.
0:48.0	We have a lift-off.
0:49.0	32 minutes past the hour.
0:52.0	Lift-off on Apollo 11th. Since that day day conspiracy theories have existed saying that the whole
0:56.6	thing is a hoax but today in 2019 there's a growing community of people who don't believe the earth is round.
1:07.0	Marco Silver, a reporter for BBC Trending, met Dave, who is one of those people.
1:12.0	On his profile picture, he's wearing black sunglasses that he was wearing also when he met me.
1:18.0	And he's wearing a black t-shirt that says something along the lines of vaccines harm, climate change doesn't exist,
1:27.6	chem trails are real, the moon landings were a hoax.
1:32.0	I travelled to the area around Sheffield to meet him. I met him at his
1:39.5	mother's place. He doesn't live there but that's where he keeps some of these most rare
1:45.3	flat earth artifacts. He loves his flat earth collection. Rare flat earth books. He
1:52.4	showed me a huge me a huge amount of pride his collection of Flat Earth books.
1:57.7	More recent ones signed by the authors, people that he met in Flat Earth conventions and
2:02.2	meetups and so on, more rare editions that he got on eBay
2:06.0	on Amazon. He got to that theory he told me because...
	...

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