Predict /
activate
What do you know about the Earth’s structure?
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How do we know that the Earth is round?
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Flat Earth: How a 19th-Century Meme
Turned Into TikTok’s Strangest Conspiracy
Theory
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What actually led you to start reporting on on
Flat Earth theory to begin with?
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So I have always watched weird people online. It’s kind
of a hobby. It’s become a profession. And as part of my
job for the Daily Beast, I was monitoring some extremist
forums in 2017, and I started seeing people post about
Flat Earth theory and I thought they were kidding.
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I thought they were just being trolls, whatever. And then
I dug in and I found out that they were extremely serious, and there was this whole burgeoning
community that thought Earth was absolutely flat.
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Can you explain what the roots of this theory are?
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Absolutely. So some background info: people tend to think that Flat Earth is a really long held belief,
that Columbus thought he might go over the edge of the flat Earth when he was exploring. And that’s
not actually true. We’ve known for thousands of years the Earth was round, but Flat Earth came roaring
back in the mid-1800s. It’s one guy’s fault, Samuel Rowbotham.
He is a really interesting figure, a former leader of this failed socialist commune that didn’t work out.
He pivoted into selling snake oil, and that kind of got him some moderate success. But where he really
struck gold was when he started proposing the Earth was flat based on some observations he’d made
while hanging out in this canal when he should have been running his commune.
Because this canal was super long and straight, it really did sort of look like a Flat earth if you were only
observing that with the naked eye. He published his findings — effectively, he lied. If you do any basic
scientific work, any rudimentary measurements, you’re going to find that Earth is round and you can
observe this with the naked eye or with the telescope.
But he published these fabricated findings, started releasing books, started going on a lecture circuit
and people were really taken by this theory, either in earnest or they thought it was funny. They’d show
up to his lectures to to try and debate him, and he was a pretty good debater so he could make a
spectacle of it. And that theory has stuck around for the next 160 years or so, fairly unchanged.
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So people thought it was a meme? Like even back then in the mid-nineteenth century,
people didn’t take it seriously?
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It was absolutely a meme, and I sort of loved the research component of this book because there were
so many historical figures that you can absolutely see who they are in a modern-day internet context.
This guy’s a YouTuber, right? Give him a YouTube channel and let him talk, and he is a wild success. He
understood that people weren’t necessarily going to believe Flat Earth theory, but that they would
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engage with it because it was so weird. And he played up that spectacle element, too. He would try and
invite scientists to his lectures to get them to debate him.
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He completely understood that what’s engaging about a conspiracy theory is that it’s so weird and it’s
so scintillating that even though people were going to come and debate him, a number of people in the
audience would be convinced anyway.
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Why do you think people are so invested in this
specific conspiracy theory? It seems like such a
strange hill to die on.
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It is really strange. I think the strangeness is part of what
draws people to Flat Earth. I mean, that certainly happened to
me. Maybe from the opposite side, it was just so weird that I
wanted to understand it better. But what I think is compelling
about Flat Earth to a lot of people is that it offers a complete
worldview. You can be a conspiracy theorist and only believe
in a few kind of fringe things and still exist mostly in the
mainstream, but think that there are chem trails in the sky or
whatever.
Flat Earth is this huge force. It’s almost like a religion in that it
gives an entire new worldview. It lets you recreate reality from
the ground up. And I think for people who feel like some
elements of their life are lacking, or that the available answers don’t make sense to them and they want
a holistic new explanation of the world, flat earth is the answer.
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Notes and answers.
1. Think about the paragraph in bold alongside the image. Re-write it in your own
words.
2. Who made the myth that the Earth is flat? Why did he do it?
3. Do you think the writer believes the Earth is flat? Why?
4. Where does the writer think most people hear about flat Earth