Today we are trying to understand corrosive propaganda and organized disinformation in an information environment that changes almost by the month. Yet some of the material being exploited inside that environment is surprisingly old.
During COVID, for example, pro-Kremlin information operations repeatedly used vaccine controversies and distrust of European regulators as material for wider narratives about supposedly corrupt or politically motivated Western institutions.
The EEAS documented these narratives throughout the pandemic.
The distrust itself did not have to be invented. It was already there.
Flat Earth seems far less consequential. Nobody is likely to collapse a health service because they think Antarctica is an ice wall. But that is partly what makes it useful.
We can trace the modern Flat Earth movement for almost two centuries and watch what happens when a false belief encounters better education, better measurements, photography, aviation, satellites, spaceflight and eventually instant access to more scientific information than Samuel Rowbotham could ever have imagined.
And still it survives.
So what exactly are we trying to fix when we talk about disinformation education?
A man, a canal and an experiment
The modern Flat Earth movement largely begins with Samuel Birley Rowbotham in nineteenth-century England.
In 1838 he carried out observations on the Old Bedford River, a long, straight drainage canal in Cambridgeshire. Rowbotham concluded from what he saw that the surface of the water did not curve.
He developed those observations into what he called Zetetic Astronomy and eventually published Earth Not a Globe. The original book is still available online, complete with diagrams and experiments intended to demonstrate his case.
What struck me while reading Rowbotham was how familiar the approach feels. It goes like this:
Go and look for yourself.
Do not accept something merely because an expert says it.
Perform the experiment.
Use your own eyes.
Rowbotham presented his Zetetic method as a way of beginning with observation rather than accepting theories first.
On the surface, this sounds remarkably close to advice we still give people today.
Think critically.
Check the evidence.
Do not blindly trust authority.
The difficulty is that a person can follow all of those instructions and still arrive at nonsense.
Looking at a canal is easy. Understanding refraction, geometry, viewing height and the limits of an observation is harder.
"See for yourself" is not necessarily a bad idea. It simply does not remove the possibility that you have no idea what you are looking at.
Samuel Rowbotham's illustration of the Bedford Level experiment. Source: Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
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That brings us to John Hampden
"Prove it"
Hampden became a supporter of Rowbotham and was sufficiently certain of the Flat Earth case that in 1870 he offered £500 to anyone who could demonstrate the curvature of the Earth.
Alfred Russel Wallace accepted.
Wallace was no random passer-by. He was a naturalist, explorer and surveyor who had independently arrived at the theory of evolution by natural selection at roughly the same time as Charles Darwin.
He redesigned the Bedford Level observation to overcome problems in Rowbotham's original experiment.
The result was consistent with the curvature expected on a spherical Earth.
Hampden did not accept it.
The umpire, J. H. Walsh, ruled that Wallace had proved his case and awarded the wager to Wallace, but Hampden accused Wallace of cheating.
The dispute continued through pamphlets, accusations, court proceedings and years of harassment.
Wallace later described the entire affair in his autobiography, My Life. Looking back, he called it "the most regrettable incident in my life" and wrote that it brought him fifteen years of litigation and persecution.
That description has stayed with me.
Hampden had asked for evidence and he had put a considerable amount of money on the outcome.
Someone produced the evidence.
The evidence still did not do what we might expect evidence to do.
Sometimes facts work and sometimes the argument simply moves elsewhere. It goes like this:
The instrument was wrong.
The experiment was rigged.
The scientist is dishonest.
The institution cannot be trusted.
We know the pattern because we still live with it.
Diagram of Wallace's Bedford Level experiment, originally published in 1870 and later reproduced in his autobiography. Source: Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
Download/source page
But Wallace is where the story takes a turn I did not expect when I began looking into Flat Earth.
Wallace meets the anti-vaccination movement
Alfred Russel Wallace, the scientist who took Hampden's challenge and demonstrated the flaw in his Flat Earth argument, later became one of the major figures in the British anti-vaccination movement.
And this was not some passing eccentricity.
Wallace studied vaccination statistics, published arguments against compulsory vaccination and became deeply involved in the debate.
A historical review published by the CDC's Emerging Infectious Diseases describes Wallace as a major participant in the anti-vaccination campaigns of late nineteenth-century England.
In 1898 he published a book whose title left very little ambiguity about his position.
Vaccination a Delusion: Its Penal Enforcement a Crime.
The entire book survives in digitized form.
I keep coming back to Wallace because he ruins a very convenient explanation.
It would be much easier if people who became involved in demonstrably false beliefs were simply stupid.
Then perhaps education really would be enough.
Wallace was very far from stupid.
He could recognize problems with somebody else's evidence. He could design an experiment. He could contribute to one of the most important scientific developments of the nineteenth century.
He could also become convinced that the medical establishment had got vaccination badly wrong.
Education did not make him immune.
Scientific training did not make him immune.
Being correct in one argument did not stop him from being wrong in another.
And this is where the discussion about disinformation education becomes more difficult.
Alfred Russel Wallace, c.1895, paired with the title page of his 1898 book Vaccination a Delusion.
Wallace portrait, Wikimedia Commons
Vaccination a Delusion, Wellcome Collection
The grown-ups are still us
There is another element running through these stories that I keep wanting to describe with a slightly provocative word.
Childishness.
I do not mean that Flat Earthers are children or that people who believe misinformation should simply grow up.
I mean the habits we usually associate with childhood.
The refusal to admit you were wrong.
The need to win an argument after the original argument has already been lost.
The attraction of belonging to a group that knows something other people do not.
The pleasure of discovering that the grown-ups are lying.
The instinct to defend people we identify with and attack people we dislike.
The ability to become completely absorbed in something that, viewed from outside, is a monumental waste of time.
Adulthood does not magically remove any of this.
We gain experience. We acquire qualifications. We learn complicated jobs. We raise families, run companies, become professors, vote and govern countries.
We are still working with a human mind that can become furious because somebody contradicted it.
Look at the amount of adult energy involved in the Flat Earth story
Rowbotham lectured and published books.
Hampden spent years fighting Wallace.
Organizations formed around the belief. Journals appeared. Experiments were conducted. Photographs were commissioned.
Then somebody actually obtained enough power to teach it in schools.
Zion
Wilbur Glenn Voliva became the dominant figure in the religious community of Zion, Illinois, in the early twentieth century.
Voliva rejected conventional astronomy and promoted his own Flat Earth cosmology.
Contemporary newspapers reported that Flat Earth was being taught in Zion's schools. A 1921 report carried the headline "Zion Students Learn Voliva's Theories That Earth...", while a history from the University of Illinois also describes Voliva's efforts to impose Flat Earth teaching in the town.
He had something Rowbotham never possessed an that is institutional power.
And he also had access to the newest mass communication technology of the period.
Radio.
Through station WCBD, Voliva could broadcast his religious and scientific views far beyond Zion.
There are photographs from the period showing Voliva posing formally for the camera, elaborate diagrams of his universe and newspaper reports describing what children were being taught.
Seen today, much of it seems ridiculous.
But imagine being a child in Zion.
Your school tells you the Earth is flat.
The religious authority tells you the Earth is flat.
Adults around you tell you the Earth is flat.
The radio tells you the Earth is flat.
At what age are you supposed to develop the independent critical thinking required to decide that all of the trusted adults around you are wrong?
This is one reason I am increasingly skeptical of the way we sometimes talk about media literacy as though it were a small toolkit people can simply be handed.
Check your sources.
Look for corroboration.
Watch for emotional language.
All useful advice.
But people do not process information in a vacuum.
They grow up inside families, political identities, religions, nations and communities.
They inherit trust before they learn how to evaluate it.
Sometimes they inherit distrust too.
Contemporary newspaper coverage of Flat Earth teaching in Zion, Illinois, 1921.
California Digital Newspaper Collection
The evidence gets better
The twentieth century should have been merciless to Flat Earth.
Satellites appeared.
Humans entered orbit.
We obtained photographs of Earth from space.
People travelled to the Moon.
The amount and variety of evidence became overwhelming.
Flat Earth did not vanish.
Instead, conspiracy explanations became increasingly important to the organized movement.
The photographs could be fake.
Space agencies could be lying.
The Moon landing could have been staged.
The scientists, governments and media could all be participating in the deception.
In 1956 Samuel Shenton founded the International Flat Earth Research Society in Britain, as a successor to the earlier Universal Zetetic Society and later carried on in the United States under Charles Johnson. The Smithsonian's history of the organization provides a useful overview of that transition.
There is a difference between believing a scientist is mistaken and believing a scientist is participating in a conspiracy.
If the scientist is merely wrong, new evidence might correct the error.
If the scientist is part of the conspiracy, evidence from the scientist becomes suspicious by definition.
A photograph of Earth from space no longer threatens the belief.
It can become evidence of how much effort is being put into deceiving you.
Once you reach that point, evidence has a much harder job.
And that is something corrosive propaganda can exploit very effectively.
It does not always need people to believe one particular lie.
Sometimes distrust is enough.
If every institution is probably corrupt, every photograph potentially fake, every journalist bought, every scientist compromised and every election suspicious, the person trying to manipulate you has an enormous advantage.
They no longer have to prove their version of events.
They only have to make every other version doubtful.
Wilbur Glenn Voliva's Flat Earth universe, published in the New-York Tribune in 1922.
Download/source page
Flat Earth gets another life
The internet did not invent Flat Earth.
In some ways it provided an almost perfect home for a style of argument that had existed since Rowbotham.
Watch this.
Try this experiment.
Look at the horizon.
Zoom in on the ship.
Ask yourself why scientists cannot explain this.
Do your own research.
Rowbotham would probably have understood the format immediately.
His nineteenth-century lectures were built around demonstrations. His books asked readers to distrust received knowledge and examine things for themselves.
What changed was the scale.
Rowbotham could demonstrate his experiments to a lecture hall. Flat Earth videos can circulate globally, surrounded by thousands of related claims.
A 2019 study of Flat Earth videos on YouTube found extensive use of conspiracy thinking, science denial and challenges to established expertise.
For some viewers the process becomes social too.
You find other people who have noticed the same thing.
They know the same references.
They follow the same channels.
They laugh at the same objections.
Eventually the belief may be connected to friendships and community as much as to astronomy.
At that point, showing someone a better diagram of the Earth is asking the diagram to do quite a lot.
Technology solved the wrong problem
For most of human history, information was scarce.
Books were expensive. Libraries were limited. Expertise might be hundreds of kilometres away. An ordinary person could spend a lifetime without access to the evidence needed to examine some claims properly.
We solved much of that.
I can sit at home today and read Rowbotham's original book.
I can find nineteenth-century newspaper archives.
I can read Wallace's arguments about vaccination.
I can look at satellite imagery, scientific papers and photographs from space without leaving my chair.
The problem is no longer simply access.
We built machines capable of putting nearly everything in front of everyone and then discovered that human beings still have to decide what they want to believe.
The same technology that provides the correction also provides the conspiracy.
Search long enough and somebody will agree with you.
Find that person and you may find ten more.
Find ten and you may have a community.
None of this requires stupidity.
It requires a human being.
So what exactly are we teaching?
There are at least some signs that education can make a difference.
One promising approach is often called prebunking or psychological inoculation. Instead of chasing every false claim after it appears, people are taught to recognize recurring manipulation techniques such as scapegoating, false dichotomies, decontextualization or attacks designed to discredit a source.
A large 2026 study conducted across 12 EU countries tested short inoculation videos with 19,735 participants around election misinformation.
The results were encouraging, but hardly miraculous.
Participants became somewhat better at recognizing manipulative content and the interventions affected sharing decisions, but the effects were generally modest and varied between countries.
That sounds much closer to reality than the idea that one media-literacy class will make somebody misinformation-proof.
There is another detail I rather like.
A 2025 study in Nature Communications examined how long inoculation effects last and whether they can be strengthened with later reminders.
The researchers found that the effects can fade and experimented with ways of refreshing them.
Apparently even inoculation against misinformation may require boosters.
There may be something useful in this direction because it changes what we are trying to teach.
We cannot possibly give people every fact they may someday need.
We cannot fact-check every false claim before it reaches an audience.
Perhaps we can get better at teaching people to recognize the machinery being used on them.
But even then I would be careful about pretending we have found the answer.
Wallace still sits there in the nineteenth century, reminding us that an educated and scientifically accomplished person can apply skepticism very differently depending on the subject.
Nearly two hundred years later
Flat Earth has been confronted with better evidence for generations.
Anti-vaccination movements have survived enormous changes in medicine.
Both changed shape, found new audiences and attached themselves to new political and cultural fights.
They grew alongside modern society rather than outside it.
That is the part I think we should pay attention to.
These movements are not fossils from an ignorant past that somehow wandered onto the internet.
They grew up with us.
The people involved were adults. Many were educated. Some were intelligent enough to make substantial contributions in other areas.
They used the newest communication technologies available to them.
They organized, published, debated and built communities.
Today those same human tendencies operate at a scale none of them possessed.
And now the consequences reach far beyond arguments about canals or vaccines.
Foreign information manipulation is being treated by the European Union as a security problem precisely because it can affect how people understand events, whom they trust and eventually how they make political choices.
The EEAS now describes FIMI as a threat to democratic processes and information integrity.
I do not have a ready-made solution to that.
Tracing these histories has actually made me less confident in some of the easy ones.
More facts are necessary, but facts alone are not enough.
Education is necessary, but Wallace reminds us that education does not make somebody immune.
Critical thinking is necessary, but Rowbotham was already telling people to investigate things for themselves.
Skepticism is necessary, but skepticism can slide into indiscriminate distrust just as easily as it can lead to healthy inquiry.
Maybe we need to be clearer about what we are trying to teach.
How manipulation works.
How we behave when a belief becomes important to us.
How trust is built and lost.
How to notice when our standards of evidence begin moving because we do not like where the evidence is going.
Flat Earth is ridiculous.
That is precisely why it is useful.
We can study the behaviour without immediately having to defend our political tribe.
And once we recognize the behaviour there, perhaps it becomes a little easier to recognize it when the subject is no longer the shape of the planet, when the propaganda is deliberately corrosive, and when the argument eventually reaches the ballot box.
And now, you know.
Selected sources:
Samuel Birley Rowbotham, Zetetic Astronomy: Earth Not a Globe
Alfred Russel Wallace, My Life, Volume II
Thomas Weber, “Alfred Russel Wallace and the Antivaccination Movement in Victorian England,” CDC
Alfred Russel Wallace, Vaccination a Delusion, Wellcome Collection
University of Illinois, “Zion, IL: Utopia on the Prairie”
1921 newspaper report on Zion schools, California Digital Newspaper Collection
Smithsonian, “The Curious History of the International Flat Earth Society”
“Conspiracy Theories and Flat-Earth Videos on YouTube”
“Video inoculation against election misinformation across 12 EU nations”
“Psychological booster shots targeting memory increase long-term resistance against misinformation”
EEAS on Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference
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