Oct. 4, 2013

“The essence of counterknowledge is that it purports to be knowledge but is not knowledge. Its claims can be shown to be untrue, either because there are facts that contradict them or because there is no evidence to support them. It misrepresents reality (deliberately or otherwise) by presenting non-facts as facts….

“The media were pushing the circulation of counterknowledge long before the public hooked up to broadband. Consider, for example, the satanic ritual abuse scare….”

– From “Counterknowledge: How we surrendered to conspiracy theories, quack medicine, bogus science and fake history” by Damian Thompson (2008)