A lot of Flat Earth’s modern resurgence has to do with the internet. Flat Earth was always around in some capacity through the 20th century, but it really began anew around 2014, 2015, when people realized that videos about Flat Earth perform really well on YouTube. Flat Earth is a fascinating topic. It inspires people to click because it’s just so outlandish. So, these videos were doing very well on the YouTube recommendation algorithm. What was always a fairly small and obscure ideology was able to pick up a lot more steam this time around.

Blame It On The Youtube Algorithm

Across the globe, millions of people believe the Earth — that whirling blue sphere, spinning through space — is, in fact, a flat plane. They think we all live beneath a dome that floats through space, or perhaps, hovers above primordial waters.
It’s unclear how many people believe some version of Flat Earth theory. Tens of thousands of people belong to social media accounts dedicated to these theories, and popular videos explaining the theory have hundreds of thousands of views.

Many People Believe The Earth Is Flat

Flat Earth doesn’t necessarily [purport] to be a religious belief. You can adopt it purely as an alt-geographical model. But most people  are quite religious, and it’s always been that way. Samuel Rowbotham, the theory’s inventor, used a lot of biblical tools in his writing, saying that the globe model conflicted with a round Earth. A lot of modern Flat Earthers will use the theory to get into other alternative Christian beliefs. A lot of them are creationists.

Flat Earth And Religion

There’s a tendency to think of conspiracy theorists as tinfoil hatters, as crazy people. But the processes are really ones that we’re all susceptible to. Everybody does have a conspiratorial streak. It’s something that we turn to when we feel like we don’t have enough information, or we don’t want to believe the information in front of us. When we try to get people out of conspiracy theories, to go into it with the understanding that this is a normal thought process. Maybe we can bring that empathy to those conversations and use that as a basis for bringing people back to reality.

The Bottom Line

Flat Earth is so outlandish and so wrong on its face, that, unlike some other conspiracy theories, it doesn’t have as much of a kernel of truth in the objective sense. There’s an emotional truth to Flat Earth. People come to it when they feel like the world is very broadly wrong. They feel as if the explanations they’ve been given just don’t align in any sense with the universe that they inhabit.

People Find The Flat Earth Theory A Security Blanket

“Flat Earth enables people to cast out all previous information that they didn't want to believe and rebuild the world from scratch."