Aren’t the birds real? Deep inside a Gen Z conspiracy theory

Huge billboards recently appeared in Pittsburgh, Memphis and Los Angeles declaring, “The birds are not real.”

On Instagram and TikTok, the Birds Aren’t Real accounts have amassed hundreds of thousands of followers, and YouTube videos about it have gone viral.

Last month, fans of Birds Aren’t Real even protested outside Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters to demand that the company change its logo, which features a bird.

All these events are related to a conspiracy theory promoted by Generation Z, which maintains that birds do not exist and that they are actually replicas of drones installed by the United States government to spy on Americans. Hundreds of thousands of young people have joined the movement, wearing Birds Aren’t Real T-shirts, attending rallies and spreading the slogan.

You might smell like QAnon, the conspiracy theory that the world is controlled by an elite of child traffickers Democrats. Except that the creator of Birds Aren’t Real and the followers of the movement are complicit in a joke: they know that the birds are, in fact, real and that their theory is made up.

What Birds Aren’t Real really is, they say, is a parodic social movement with a purpose. In the post-truth world, dominated by online conspiracy theories, young people have rallied around this effort to criticize, combat and poke fun at disinformation. It’s Gen Z’s attempt to disrupt the rabbit hole with the absurd.

“It’s a way to fight the world’s problems that you can’t fight any other way,” said Claire Chronis, 22, an organizer of Birds Aren’t Real in Pittsburgh. “My favorite way to describe the organization is to fight madness with madness.”

At the center of the movement is 23-year-old Peter McIndoe, a straight-haired boy who dropped out of college in Memphis and created Birds Aren’t Real on a whim in 2017. For years, he remained in character as the main believer in the game. conspiracy theory and ordered acolytes to rage against those who defied its dogma. But now, McIndoe said in an interview, he’s willing to reveal the parody so people don’t think the birds are actually drones.

“In dealing with the world of disinformation over the past few years, we have been very aware of the line we are treading,” he said. “The idea is intended to be very absurd, but we make sure that nothing we say is too realistic. That is something that must be taken into account when exiting the character ”.

Most of the members of Birds Aren’t Real, many of whom are part of a network of activism on the ground called the Bird Brigade, grew up in a world plagued by misinformation. Some have relatives who have been the victims of conspiracy theories. For this reason, for members of Generation Z, the movement has become a way of dealing collectively with these experiences. By disguising themselves as conspiracy theorists, they have found a community and an affinity, McIndoe said.

“Birds Aren’t Real is not a superficial satire of conspiracies from the outside. It is a satire from the depths, “he said. “A lot of people in our generation feel the madness in all of this, and Birds Aren’t Real has been a way for people to process it.”

Cameron Kasky, 21, a Parkland, Florida activist who helped organize the March for Our Lives student protest against gun violence in 2018 and participates in Birds Aren’t Real, said the parody “makes you stop for a second. and laugh. At a singularly bleak time to come of age, it doesn’t hurt to have something to laugh about together. “

McIndoe, too, has been drenched in conspiracies. During her first 18 years, she grew up with seven siblings in a deeply conservative and religious community outside of Cincinnati, and later in rural Arkansas. He was homeschooled and taught that “evolution was a massive brainwashing scheme by the Democrats and that Obama was the Antichrist,” he said.

Read books like Remote Control, about, the book argues, hidden anti-Christian messages from Hollywood. In high school, social media offered him a gateway to mainstream culture. McIndoe started seeing Philip DeFranco and other popular YouTubers talking about current affairs and pop culture, and went on Reddit to find new points of view.

“I was raised online, because that’s where I ended up finding a lot of my education real, through documentaries and YouTube,” McIndoe said. “My whole understanding of the world was formed thanks to the internet.”

When McIndoe left home for the University of Arkansas in 2016, he said, he realized he wasn’t the only young man forced to straddle multiple realities.

So in January 2017, McIndoe traveled to Memphis to visit friends. Donald Trump had just been sworn in as president and there was a women’s march downtown. There were also pro-Trump counter-protesters. When McIndoe saw them, he said, he tore a poster off a wall, turned it over, and wrote a few random words: “Birds aren’t real.”

“It was a spontaneous joke, but it was a reflection of the absurdity that everyone felt,” he said.

Then McIndoe began to walk and, meanwhile, improvised the base of the Birds Aren’t Real conspiracy. He said it was part of a larger movement that believed birds had been replaced by surveillance drones and that the cover-up began in the 1970s. It was unknowingly filmed and the video posted on Facebook. It went viral, especially among teenagers in the southern United States.

In Memphis it didn’t take long for graffiti of “Birds Aren’t Real” to appear. Photos of the phrase scribbled on blackboards and walls of local high schools appeared. People made Birds Aren’t Real stickers.

McIndoe decided to embrace Birds Aren’t Real. “I started to embody the character and build the world that he belonged to,” he said. He and Connor Gaydos, a friend, wrote a bogus history of the movement, concocted elaborate theories, and produced bogus documents and evidence to support their outlandish claims.

“It basically became a disinformation experiment,” McIndoe said. “We were able to build a totally fictional world that the local media reported as fact and questioned by the public.”

Gaydos added: “If anyone believes that birds are not real, we are the last of their worries, because then there is probably no conspiracy that they do not believe in.”

In 2018, McIndoe dropped out of college and moved to Memphis. To take Birds Aren’t Real further, he created a brochure that very quickly rose to the top of Reddit. He hired an actor to portray a former CIA agent who confessed to working in bird drone surveillance; The video has more than 20 million views on TikTok. He also hired actors to portray adult bird conspirators in videos that spread across Instagram.

That same year, McIndoe began selling Birds Aren’t Real merchandise. The money, which totals several thousand dollars a month, helps McIndoe and Gaydos cover their day-to-day expenses.

“All the money from our merchandise line goes to ensuring that Connor and I can do this full time,” McIndoe said. “We also used the money for billboards and to pay for airline tickets for members of the Bird Brigade to rallies. None of the proceeds goes to anything harmful. “

To adults concerned about McIndoe’s tactics, the researchers tell them that the damage will most likely be minimal.

“You have to weigh the possible negative effects with any of these things, but in this case it is extremely small,” said Joshua Citarella, an independent researcher who studies internet culture and online radicalization in young people. “Allowing people to participate in the construction of a collaborative world is therapeutic because it allows them to disarm the conspiracy and participate in a safe way.”

McIndoe said he had these concerns in mind. “Everything we have done with Birds Aren’t Real is designed to make sure it is not headed to a side that could have a negative end result in the world,” he said. “It is a safe space for people to come together and process how conspiracy takes America. It is a way of laughing at madness instead of letting yourself be overcome by it. “

The effort has been cathartic for young people, like Heitho Shipp, 22, who lives in Pittsburgh.

“Most conspiracy theories are fueled by hatred or distrust of a powerful leader, but this is about finding a way out of our malaise,” he said. He added that the movement was “more about media literacy.”

Members of Birds Aren’t Real have also become a political force. Many often join counter-protesters and true conspiracy theorists in defusing tensions and delegitimizing the people they march with with irreverent chants.

In September, shortly after a restrictive new abortion law took effect in Texas, members of Birds Aren’t Real appeared at a protest organized by anti-abortion activists at the University of Cincinnati. Supporters of the new law “had posters with very graphic images and were very aggressive in condemning people,” McIndoe said. “That led to discussions.”

But the Bird Brigade began to chant: “The birds are not real.” Their screams soon overtook pro-life activists, who left.

McIndoe now has big plans for 2022. Getting out of character is necessary to help Birds Aren’t Real take it to the next level and retract true conspiracy theorists, he said. He added that he hoped to collaborate with major content creators and independent outlets such as Channel 5 News, whose goal is to help people understand the current situation in the United States and the internet.

“I’m very excited about what the future of this could look like as a true force for good,” he said. “Yes, we have been intentionally spreading disinformation for the past four years, but it is for a purpose. It is about putting a mirror in front of the United States in the internet age ”. (I)

Taylor Lorenz is a Los Angeles-based tech reporter covering tech culture and online content creators. Before work at The New York Times, was a technology and culture writer at The Atlantic. @taylorlorenz