Case Study 1.2: Flat Earth Belief in the Age of the Internet

Chapter 1: What Is Truth? Epistemological Foundations

Overview

That the Earth is roughly spherical has been established beyond any reasonable scientific doubt for over two thousand years. Ancient Greek philosophers calculated the Earth's circumference with impressive accuracy. Every satellite photograph, every circumnavigation, every GPS system, every space mission, every atmospheric physics textbook, and every direct observation from altitude confirms it. And yet, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, flat Earth belief underwent a remarkable revival, fueled by social media, YouTube, and online community formation. By the late 2010s, the Flat Earth Society had tens of thousands of active members, Flat Earth conferences drew hundreds of attendees, and surveys suggested that measurable percentages of younger adults in multiple countries expressed doubt about the spherical Earth.

This case study examines flat Earth belief not primarily to refute it (the evidence is overwhelming and well-documented) but as a lens for understanding how and why people come to hold false beliefs in the face of strong contrary evidence, what epistemological factors make belief revision difficult, and what this tells us about the epistemic challenges of the information age.

Historical Context: Why the "Medieval Flat Earth" Story Is Itself a Myth

A preliminary clarification is essential: the common belief that medieval Europeans thought the Earth was flat is itself largely false. This myth, propagated by nineteenth-century writers including Washington Irving (in a fictionalized biography of Columbus) and later popularized in textbooks, has been thoroughly debunked by historians of science.

Educated people in medieval Europe knew the Earth was spherical. The works of Aristotle, which described the spherical Earth and gave arguments for it, were the foundation of European university education from the twelfth century onward. Dante's Divine Comedy (14th century) depicts a clearly spherical Earth with antipodes. Thomas Aquinas, Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon — all medieval scholars held a spherical-Earth view as unproblematic.

This correction matters epistemically: flat Earth belief is not a survival of medieval ignorance. It is a modern phenomenon, constructed in the information age, requiring active resistance to overwhelming evidence. Understanding why it exists requires understanding what modern conditions enable and encourage it.

The Modern Flat Earth Movement

Origins

The modern flat Earth movement traces its intellectual lineage to Samuel Birley Rowbotham (1816–1884), a Victorian-era English inventor who published Zetetic Astronomy: Earth Not a Globe (1865) and later founded the Zetetic Society. Rowbotham's approach was to conduct experiments and observations that he claimed supported a flat Earth, dismissing contrary evidence. His "Bedford Level Experiment" — an attempted demonstration on a canal — was refuted during his lifetime but was nonetheless the foundation of modern flat Earth argumentation.

The Flat Earth Society was reconstituted in the 1950s by Samuel Shenton and continued by Charles K. Johnson in the United States through the late twentieth century. For decades it was a minor fringe oddity.

The YouTube Era

The contemporary flat Earth revival is substantially a product of YouTube and social media. Beginning around 2014–2015, a wave of flat Earth videos began generating large viewerships. Creators including Eric Dubay (based in Thailand), Mark Sargent (the subject of the documentary Behind the Curve, 2018), and others produced slickly edited videos presenting flat Earth arguments to audiences who encountered them through YouTube's recommendation algorithm.

The mechanism is significant: YouTube's algorithm, optimized for engagement and watch time, found that conspiracy and alternative-reality content generated high engagement. Users watching one conspiracy video were recommended related videos, drawing them deeper into alternative content ecosystems. This is not a conspiracy — it is an emergent property of recommendation optimization that happened to create pathways into fringe belief communities for viewers who would not have sought them out.

The Epistemological Anatomy of Flat Earth Belief

1. Experiential Epistemology vs. Scientific Knowledge

One powerful appeal of flat Earth belief is its claim to be grounded in direct experience. Flat Earthers often say: "Look around you — the Earth looks flat. Trust your own eyes." This seems to invoke empiricism, the philosophical tradition that holds that knowledge derives from sensory experience.

But this is a selective and naive empiricism. The spherical Earth is not detectable by casual observation — the Earth is large enough that its curvature is imperceptible to a person standing on its surface, just as a very gentle hillside appears flat from a single vantage point. What direct experience actually gives us is a locally flat appearance, not a globally flat Earth. Inferring global flatness from local appearance is an error in spatial inference, not an honest reading of experience.

Genuine empiricism — as practiced by scientists — requires carefully designed observations that can distinguish between competing hypotheses, accounting for the limits of individual perception, and aggregating observations from multiple independent vantage points. When careful observations have been made (stellar parallax, the view from high altitude, the horizon observed from different heights, the circular shadow Earth casts on the Moon during lunar eclipses, the mast-first appearance of ships over the horizon), they all support a spherical Earth.

2. The Role of Trust in Epistemic Systems

Many flat Earthers arrived at their position through radical distrust of established epistemic institutions — NASA, academic science, mainstream media, government — rather than through independent evidence gathering. The argument structure often runs: "Why should I trust NASA? They lied about [X]. Therefore, everything they say about the Earth could be false. Therefore, the Earth might be flat."

This reasoning has a legitimate concern at its core: epistemic institutions can be wrong, biased, or corrupt, and trust in them should not be uncritical. But the inference from "institutions can sometimes be wrong" to "we should disbelieve entire bodies of established science" is invalid. The spherical Earth is not an institutional claim — it can be independently verified by anyone with access to a high-altitude balloon, a long-distance observation over water, or an app showing satellite telemetry.

The flat Earth case illustrates a key insight from social epistemology: when individuals lose trust in distributed epistemic institutions, they don't become independent knowers. They typically substitute one form of testimony-dependence (trusting mainstream institutions) for another (trusting alternative communities) — but the alternative communities often have far lower epistemic standards and fewer accountability mechanisms.

3. Conspiracy as Epistemological Armor

The most distinctive feature of flat Earth belief, epistemologically, is the way conspiracy theory functions as a defense against disconfirmation. For the belief to be maintained in the face of overwhelming counter-evidence, all that counter-evidence must be explained away:

• Satellite photographs are CGI created by NASA
• Circumnavigations follow a flat-Earth circular path, not a globe
• Gravity doesn't exist; things fall because the flat Earth is accelerating upward
• GPS works on a flat-Earth model; the algorithms are simply different
• Every astronaut, every pilot, every scientist who corroborates the globe is either deceived or part of the conspiracy

Each auxiliary hypothesis saves the core belief from a specific counter-example. But the cumulative implausibility grows with each addition: the conspiracy would need to involve tens of thousands of scientists, pilots, military officials, and governments across dozens of nations that are otherwise in fierce geopolitical competition. The conspiracy is required to be simultaneously invisible (no major leaks) and impossibly vast.

This is a textbook example of what philosopher Karl Popper called an "unfalsifiable" theory — one that can accommodate any possible evidence by adjusting auxiliary hypotheses. Popper argued that the willingness to specify what evidence would disprove a theory is the mark of genuine empirical inquiry. When asked what would change their mind, many flat Earthers either cannot answer or specify conditions that they then reject when presented.

4. Community and Identity

Research by sociologists and psychologists studying the flat Earth community reveals that belief maintenance is substantially sustained by community belonging. For many flat Earthers, the belief community provides: - Social connection (online groups, annual conferences) - A sense of special knowledge ("we know what they don't want you to know") - Identity and purpose (investigating truth against powerful opposition) - Meaning (the universe has been deliberately hidden; there must be a reason)

This social dimension explains why pure factual correction is so ineffective. Challenging the belief challenges the community, the identity, and the social relationships. Psychologists Matthew Hornsey and Kelly Fielding have documented that attitude change on factual matters is often resisted not because of the evidence but because of the social meaning of the attitude. To abandon flat Earth belief is not just to accept a fact — it is to abandon a community.

5. The Paradox of Scientific Skepticism

Flat Earthers often describe themselves as skeptics and free-thinkers who "question everything" — and they deploy scientific-sounding rhetoric, conducting "experiments" and demanding "evidence." This appropriation of skeptical and scientific language is epistemologically interesting.

Genuine scientific skepticism involves: - Applying equal skepticism to all hypotheses, including one's own preferred conclusions - Taking seriously the full body of available evidence, not cherry-picking - Being genuinely responsive to evidence — being willing to update beliefs when evidence demands - Deferring to expertise on technical questions while understanding the structure of the evidence

What flat Earthers typically practice is selective skepticism: they apply extreme skepticism to mainstream claims while accepting fringe claims uncritically. The YouTube videos they trust are not subjected to the same scrutiny they apply to NASA reports. The community consensus they rely on is not questioned as institutional consensus is questioned.

This selective skepticism is an epistemological incoherence. Genuine skepticism should apply equally to all sources, including the alternative information community.

The Documentary "Behind the Curve" and the Gyroscope Incident

The 2018 Netflix documentary Behind the Curve offers a remarkable moment that crystallizes the epistemology of flat Earth belief. Flat Earth advocate Bob Knodel purchases a precision gyroscope to test a prediction of the spherical Earth model: a gyroscope should precess (tilt) at approximately 15 degrees per hour, tracking Earth's rotation, if the Earth is spherical. On a flat Earth, no such precession would occur.

Knodel runs the test. The gyroscope precesses at 15 degrees per hour, exactly as the spherical Earth model predicts. His response, captured on film: "We obviously were not able to do this experiment because... it clearly shows the rotation... we don't want to talk about that."

This moment encapsulates the epistemological failure: the experiment gives a clear, unambiguous result confirming the spherical Earth, and the experimenter cannot integrate it. Instead of updating his belief, he refuses to publicize the result. The belief is maintained not against evidence but despite evidence the believer himself generated.

Why This Matters Beyond Flat Earth

Flat Earth belief might seem trivially false and sociologically marginal. Why study it as a serious epistemological case?

First, it represents a pure case of the general epistemological pathologies that generate all kinds of misinformation belief: confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, tribal epistemology, unfalsifiable conspiracy theories, and the failure of factual correction. Understanding it illuminates the general mechanisms.

Second, the conditions that enable flat Earth belief — algorithmically curated alternative media ecosystems, declining trust in institutions, online community formation around fringe beliefs — are the same conditions that enable medically dangerous misinformation (vaccine hesitancy, unproven treatments), politically dangerous misinformation (election fraud claims, foreign policy disinformation), and other forms of consequential false belief.

Third, the flat Earth case offers relatively clear epistemic terrain — the evidence for a spherical Earth is so overwhelming that there is essentially no reasonable doubt. This makes it a good laboratory for understanding epistemic dynamics without the genuine empirical uncertainty that complicates many other cases.

Lessons from the Flat Earth Case

On Evidence and Belief

The flat Earth case demonstrates that evidence — even evidence the believer has personally gathered — is insufficient to change belief when social, identity, and psychological factors maintain it. This is deeply challenging for any epistemology that assumes rational agents update beliefs in response to evidence. Human belief formation is not a pure evidence-processing function; it is a social, emotional, and identity-laden process.

On Institutional Trust

The flat Earth movement's growth correlates with declining institutional trust. Rebuilding epistemic institutions — making them more transparent, accountable, and genuinely trustworthy — may be as important as individual media literacy education. People who have good reasons to trust reliable epistemic institutions have better access to accurate information than people thrown back on their own devices in a fragmented media environment.

On the Limits of Debunking

Fact-checking flat Earth claims is easy. Changing flat Earth believers' minds is hard. This asymmetry should inform how we approach misinformation more broadly. The strategy of publishing refutations, while necessary, is insufficient. Addressing the social, psychological, and institutional conditions that make people susceptible to flat Earth-type thinking requires engagement with those deeper factors.

On Epistemically Healthy Communities

Perhaps the most constructive lesson is about what epistemic health in communities looks like: genuine openness to evidence (including disconfirmatory evidence), accountability for claims, willingness to update, respect for expertise while maintaining critical engagement, and social reward for accuracy rather than for loyalty to community positions.

Discussion Questions

1. The flat Earthers in Behind the Curve describe themselves as skeptics who "question everything." How does their actual epistemic practice differ from genuine scientific skepticism? What would genuine epistemic autonomy look like in this domain?

2. Many flat Earthers arrived at their beliefs through YouTube's recommendation algorithm rather than through independent inquiry. Does this origin story have any bearing on the epistemic status of their beliefs? Should we evaluate beliefs differently based on how they were formed?

3. The gyroscope incident suggests that even first-person experimental evidence confirming the spherical Earth is insufficient to update a committed flat Earther's belief. What does this imply about the relationship between evidence and belief, and about the role of non-evidential factors in belief maintenance?

4. Research suggests that flat Earth believers often have genuine social communities organized around their belief. If you were trying to help a flat Earth believer update their beliefs, how would you approach it — purely with evidence, or would you need to address the social dimensions as well? What does this tell us about the epistemology of belief change?

5. The flat Earth case involves completely false factual beliefs. How is it similar to and different from cases of genuine scientific uncertainty (like early COVID-19 research) where the evidence is actually ambiguous? What distinguishes appropriate uncertainty from unfounded denial?

6. Many people find flat Earth belief amusing or contemptible. Is this a productive response? What are the epistemological risks of dismissing flat Earthers rather than understanding the mechanics of their belief? How might understanding those mechanics help us address more consequential forms of misinformation?

Further Investigation

• Watch: Behind the Curve (Netflix, 2018) — documentary on the flat Earth movement.
• Read: Asheley Landrum et al., research on science communication and the flat Earth community (published through Texas Tech University's media and psychology research).
• Read: Kate Starbird's research on alternative news ecosystems and misinformation spread.
• Explore: The work of "conspiracy theory" psychologists Jan-Willem van Prooijen and Karen Douglas on the psychology of conspiracy belief.
• Experiment: Replicate a classic spherical-Earth demonstration yourself (e.g., observe the ship-over-the-horizon effect, track the circular shadow in a lunar eclipse, or measure the angle of noon sunlight at two distant locations simultaneously).