A throwaway comment by US President Joe Biden MP about a “new world order” has gone viral after being picked up by conspiracy theorists.
Biden made the comment during an address on Tuesday, Australian time, about a “changing world order” amid the Russia-Ukraine war.
The phrase “new world order” is a term regularly used to describe a time of change. It’s also the name of a longstanding conspiracy theory about a global totalitarian government run by shadowy forces like the illuminati or Freemasons. The theory often carries anti-Semitic undertones.
As soon as it was uttered, some expected it would garner some attention. And it did. There were hundreds of posts — many explicitly endorsing conspiracy theories — about about Joe Biden’s comments.
A similar throwaway line made by Australia’s NSW chief health officer Kerry Chant went viral when she was talking about contact-tracing.
“We will be looking at what contact-tracing looks like in the new world order — yes, it will be pubs and clubs, and other things, if we have a positive case there [but] our response may be different if we know people are fully vaccinated,” she said.
The term trended on Twitter in Australia — and then around the world. One version of the video posted by a user on Twitter has gained more than 2.5 million views. Google searches for “new world order” spiked.
Some of the attention came from anti-government conspiracy theorists who said the phrase proved that Australia’s strict COVID-19 public health measures were actually more sinister.
Everyone from anti-vaxxers to QAnon believers to one of the world’s biggest right-wing YouTubers, Steven Crowder, shared it on Facebook, Twitter and Telegram. Many sharers seemed to be sceptical of the conspiracy but were sharing it because they expected it would pique the interest of fringe social media users.
Likewise with Biden’s comment — it was represented as not an innocuous turn of phrase but rather a slip of the tongue that revealed his attempts to create a new world order.
Of course, the use of the phrase wasn’t an announcement by a state’s chief health officer or the US President that they were installing themselves as a global monarch. (If that was the goal, it would be ill-advised to announce it at a press conference or in an interview until power had already been seized.) The idea is ridiculous to anyone not already primed to believe it.
What this saga shows is how easily moments can be cut up, shared, remixed and take on a life of their own. Until recently a comment like this would have got little notice — perhaps a write-up in the traditional media before being quickly forgotten. Now it is likely to live on as part of the corpus of out-of-context moments and events that conspiracists use to reinforce and promote their world views.
More than anything else, these “new world order” comments are perfect grist for the content mill. There are thousands of online influencers and communities who are desperate for some new piece of material to feed to their platforms which will prove their worldview, grow and excite their audience.
Perhaps Rudyk and Chant should have been careful with their words, but there’s always a chance that something said or done (perhaps taken out of context or misleadingly framed) can go viral.
The most people can hope for is that it doesn’t happen to them.
