Key takeaways

Rises in fear and anxiety in response to government action can exacerbate mental health risk factors, and, in turn, fuel conspiracist thinking, according to ANU research investigating how security agencies handle conspiracist-led unrest.

Security responses should address this fear and suspicion to not only prevent harm but limit its spread, the experts say.

The ANU investigation comes in the context of rising prevalence of conspiracy thinking in the Australian population, which accelerated in response to COVID-19 measures and has continued to rise over time.

Discussing specific tactical responses, the experts showed that managing levels of fear and anxiety in the population is critical to achieving positive outcomes.

For example, ACT Policing’s deployment of Long Range Acoustic Devices at the 2022 Canberra Convoy protests fuelled a litany of conspiracy theories. The devices are a longstanding tool that authorities have deployed when there’s a risk that they’ll need to control large crowds. In the Canberra Convoy case they were set up near large gatherings, but their deterrence capability wasn’t used.

Still, Convoy members complained of nausea, dizziness, blisters, burns and headaches, which many then ascribed to the devices, calling them ‘directed energy weapons’ or ‘microwave emitters’. Even those who correctly identified the devices blamed some of these symptoms on them. To those protestors, the security response wasn’t perceived as an objectionable political choice, or an inappropriate effort to suppress opposition to a policy. In their eyes, it was an attack. They saw the government’s security measures as directly threatening.

This generated new conspiracy theories which proliferated through social media across Australia and around the world.

Where more traditional protesters might fear the outcome of a certain policy, recent conspiracist-led protests have been characterised by fear of policy itself. To such people, any policy or response by government can be seen as a threat.

Evidence shows that crisis messaging should be carefully designed to factor in known issues of trust and fear.

Communication that doesn’t consider low-trust groups can create serious problems in a crisis.

For example, the Victorian Chief Health Officer’s ‘anecdotal’ claim during the COVID-19 pandemic that the Delta variant was ‘more transmissible in children’, should’ve been avoided.

The perceived safety of children holds a powerful place in most conspiracy thinking. This Delta claim – later found to be inaccurate – was amplified by news outlets before spreading into wider conspiracy discourse.

If conspiracist anxieties were anticipated, the perceived benefits of making an anecdotal report ‘official’ may have been weighed against the risk of these consequences, likely resulting in a better outcome.

As such, law enforcement and crisis management agencies should engage with psychology and mental health expertise to develop a capacity for ‘low-trust communication’.

As a standard procedure, agencies could work to a checklist of questions.

For instance, balancing ‘to what degree will this measure mitigate the immediate threat’ alongside ‘how might it fuel wider threats of misinformation and conspiracy?’ could prevent innocent miscommunications from inadvertently fuelling conspiracist-led unrest.

In today’s environment, some version of robust engagement with conspiracist mental health is crucial to keeping the community safe.

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