Much has been written recently about online “echo chambers”: the idea that we are served on the Internet with sites and recommendations that reinforce our pre-existing beliefs. If you watch a lot of science videos on YouTube, follow a lot of scientists on Twitter, and regularly Google science questions, your online experience will move away from neutral because search results, article sorting, and recommendations will be adapted to your professional. -scientific position. This is an echo chamber because over time you only hear your beliefs repeated to you and you stop seeing what is happening on the other side.
There are also echo chambers for pseudoscientists, although Mike Adams’ online bubble is so vast and self-sufficient that it warrants the term “ecosystem.”
Mike Adams, also known as the Health Ranger, is a strong advocate of alternative medicine. He is anti-vaccination, anti-GMO, anti-medicine.
(Editor’s note: read the GLP profile on Mike Adams)
You may know him as the owner of NaturalNews.com. According to the website, its 20 writers and researchers produce up to 15 articles per day. If this massive undertaking already sounds impressive, you might want to know that NaturalNews.com is just the visible tip of a very large iceberg.
A little online investigation revealed that Mike Adams owns over 50 websites. The topics they address go beyond alternative medicine and help shape an entire worldview: fear of medicine and science (ogm.news, medicine.newsvaccines.news), anti-left and pro-freedom media hype (campusinsanity.com, libtards.news, freedom.news) and tips for preparing for the end of the world (survival.news, collapse.news).
On biodefense.comyou can listen to a 45-minute audio clip of Mike Adams showing you how to build an emergency Ebola isolation room at home “after the hospitals are overrun” (never mind that Ebola doesn’t spread easily and few cases have ever been reported). to North America).
On chlorellafactor.com— a web page dedicated to an algae sold as a superfood — you’ll be afraid to think that all the chlorella sellers want to kill you… except Adams who, of course, wants you to know that his store carries Clean Chlorella “even if it means less profit than retailing cheaper, lower quality chlorella.” While Adams presents this food source as a defense against cancerthe proof is not there.
On consumerwellness.org, you will find a legitimate-looking portal for a non-profit organization that funds educational programs. Press releases on the website claim that the Center distributes educational grants each year to help school children, pregnant women, school nutrition programs and low-income families. Under “Board of Directors”, only one person is named: Mike Adams. There is an invitation to “join our advisory board” but no members are listed. The website was last updated in 2016, although the organization was benefits from tax-exempt status in 1995.
To help you get back within the limits of this online ecosystem, Mike Adams offers you a toolbar for web browsers so that no matter which website you visit, NaturalNews.com is never more than a click away. If you’re thinking of searching Wikipedia for a particular food or nutrient, stop. Mike Adams has NaturalPediawhich offers biased health information such as his page on naturopathy. There you will “learn” that it can treat irritable bowel syndrome and ulcers. At the bottom of the page you will see advertisements for iodine, magnesium and colloidal silver because, like the ending you predict in the middle of a bad movie, you will have deduced by now that Adams has a store.
Digging a little deeper reveals a stranger complexity in Adams’ ecosystem.
Mike Adams has a search engine. If you’re looking for a replacement for Google that “filters out corporate propaganda and government misinformation,” Adams suggests using Good Gopher. Searching for “Washington Post,” for example, didn’t show me the Washington Post website; instead, I was sent to TruthWiki, RealInvestigations.News, Disinfo.news, and a whole alternate reality in which the newspaper produces fake news and is beholden to Monsanto. Some of the “independent news sites” Good Gopher sticks to that aren’t owned by Mike Adams include a far-right site. Breitbart.com and the epicenter of the Alex Jones conspiracy Infowars.com.
Like Google, Adams’ Good Gopher, whose animal mascot, seen holding a magnifying glass, is represented in reassuring cartoon form, is not just a simple search engine. It’s linked to Gopher Mail, an email service that promises to be “100% uncensored,” whatever that means. Alongside Facebook, Adams presents his own social network on https://share.naturalnews.com, hosted by Diaspora (a social media platform created by people who are wary of online service providers hoarding and selling your personal information to advertisers). I joined Natural News’ “online social world where you are in control” using a pseudonym and immediately received an article telling me to eat more olives to prevent cancer. Plus, ginger is “monumentally superior” to chemotherapy, I’m told.
Perhaps the most confusing space in this alternative ecosystem is Adams. portal search for health topics in scientific literature. You are prompted to enter the name of a disease, symptom, food, plant, nutrient, or therapy of any kind, and a list of scientific articles on that topic is then displayed. The search results, however, belong to PubMed, the search engine run by the US National Institutes of Health and widely used by biomedical researchers around the world. The URL for these search results even includes the PubMed ID number assigned to each article listed. So why not just provide a link to PubMed so people can search the literature that way? Suspecting biased filtering of results, a friend searched for the last 300 additions to PubMed on Adams’ portal: they were all there. No evidence of foul play makes this addition to its ecosystem an open question.
It’s important to raise awareness about this online “alternate reality” because the world of alternative medicine can seem, to the casual observer, rather innocuous. However, behind the curtain of empathy and so-called holistic care often lies a darker notion: modern medicine cannot be trusted. Few proponents of alternative medicine reach the near-operatic heights of Mike Adams, but his misinformation empire has major ramifications. In the age of the digital echo chamber, his voice can be heard even if you’re not looking for it.
Her Twitter account has 124,000 subscribers. The day I wrote this, he tweeted about reducing stroke risk by drinking whole milk; on the chemical bisphenol-A that causes gender confusion; and about a woman who cured her cancer with cannabis oil. These tweets lead to its websites, which are searchable through its Good Gopher engine and accessible through its social media platform.
Mike Adams’ dark, conspiratorial wonderland is vast, and the rabbit hole is frighteningly deep. “Down, down.” Would the fall never end?
(Thanks to Geoff Brown for investigative work.)
Jonathan Jarry is a biologist who focuses on critical science communication. Follow him on the blog/podcast All the evidence or on Twitter @crackedscience.
This article was originally published in the McGill Office of Science and Society under the title Mike Adams builds an alternate reality online and has been republished here with permission.
