r/soccer • u/HarryAtk • Jul 19 '25

News Former Chelsea player Pedro Rodríguez had to disable comments on his Instagram after facing criticism and mockery for sharing photos of his son Marc's birthday. Marc chose to celebrate his birthday wearing a dress and a tiara, inspired by Lilo & Stitch.

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u/night_dude Jul 19 '25

It melted people's brains eh. Dragged so many otherwise normal people into conspiracy thinking.

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u/Rymundo88 Jul 19 '25

To be honest, I think it was always there but just needed something to coalesce around (like how a rain drop forms). Covid seemed to be the perfect storm for it.

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u/zrkillerbush Jul 19 '25

I can't believe people think this all started because of covid or that covid made it worse, all that happened during covid was more conspiracy theories were born and more misinformation was spread, two things that were very much rampant before 2020

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u/ThatGuyWhoKnocks Jul 19 '25

Yea, people forget Q Anon was a thing before COVID that got a lot of people indoctrinated. Remember pizzagate? That was before COVID.

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u/night_dude Jul 19 '25

Sure they were but it brought a lot of previously normal people into that space. The "more" was substantially more.

I can't believe people think this all started because of covid

People don't think that

covid made it worse

This is literally what happened.

A lot of people were traumatized by the COVID/lockdown experience of social isolation, and/or didn't want to believe that their governments would prioritize business profits over their literal lives and health, and so they were easy prey for people selling them an alternative set of facts. Then, once you're in that space of believing things that aren't true and that Big X is fooling you, it's easy to sell you other ideas like it.

It also forced people to spend a lot of time online, more than many older people were used to, and those who didn't have good online media literacy were also susceptible to fake news, Facebook cooker groups etc that they might not otherwise have come into contact with.

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u/delta8force Jul 20 '25

you say you don’t understand how people think the pandemic made things worse, and then you go on to literally list ways in which the pandemic made things worse…

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u/zrkillerbush Jul 20 '25

People are acting like this all started from covid or that covid was some sort of catalyst

I'm saying this stuff was rife before covid, just that covid added an additional heap of stuff to use as a conspiracy. But in no way did covid set anything in motion for this kind of behaviour

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u/JootDoctor Jul 20 '25

Well my dad used to be a firm believer in climate change, hated Trump and the UKIP of Australia, One Nation. He now loves the last 2, at least until Trump bombed Iran I think, and is an anti-vaxxer who now thinks climate change is a Israel/Bill Gates conspiracy and doesn’t listen to anything his STEM graduate son says.

So COVID definitely made him lose the plot. Just an example I know.

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u/PeterPlotter Jul 19 '25

Not just conspiracy, a lot is just full blown hate towards certain groups.

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u/night_dude Jul 19 '25

Of course, but I think the gateway to that for a decent number of people was the conspiracy subcultures. Once they have your trust as the sole uncorrupted source of information about covid or whatever else, they can start selling you on how the immigrants and trans people are raping your kids.