New York bike activists ride the toxic disinformation lane
I love flagging local reporting like this when I see it: an unremarkable neighborhood meeting over bike lanes escalated into a “belligerent free-for-all” last week in Park Slope, Brooklyn, after an anti-bike activist starting spewing conspiracy theories about a Jeffrey Epstein “pedophile-linked bike lobby,” shoving around pro-bike lane activists, and barking out one-liners in a thick New York accent (“You wanna clown around with me?”). Another anti-bike activist followed with a string of accusations that he had a friend whose death was “covered-up” by bike lane supporters. The meeting, held in one of New York’s most comfortable neighborhoods, was turned into a “venue for a few toxic voices to blame and shame,” said the director of one of the pro-bike groups.
Sometimes stories like this read more like comedy sketches, but I think they’re also important reminders how porous our computer screens are, how disinformation seeps into our everyday, offline world and wreaks havoc. After all, when was the last time you met fake news in the “real” world? My guess is probably not too long ago.
For me, it was just a couple weeks ago at the McCain Institute conference in Tbilisi when a pro-Russian, Georgian politician and her TV crew gatecrashed a panel about Russia and then later that week brought several thousand angry protestors to the U.S. embassy (here’s a write-up from the Washington Post if you missed it). It’s a surprising event in an overwhelmingly pro-Western country, which we documented in our series Clash of Narratives.
And sure, the Park Slope meeting seem like an oddball example, but these toxic, disinformation-fueled exchanges between neighbors are happening all the time. We’ve all seen how with enough oxygen a conspiracy theory escalates into violence and persists for years. Earlier this year in Washington DC, my favorite pizza shop was attacked yet again by Pizzagate conspiracy theorists.