The creators of the fake conspiracy theory Birds Aren’t Real say they are highlighting the current wave of misinformation by fighting “lunacy with lunacy”.
What started as a spontaneous prank by 24-year-old college dropout Peter McIndoe in Memphis in 2017 has since turned into a popular youth movement designed to shine a light on the absurdity of “real” conspiracy theories.
The central claim of the parody, which has spread to billboards and bumper stickers, is that the US government deliberately killed billions of birds and replaced them with hi-tech surveillance drones.
In an interview with 60 Minutes that aired Sunday, founder Peter McIndoe was initially interviewed “in character” as the po-faced chief architect of the Birds Aren’t Real crusade.
Keeping up the act, Mr McIndoe told correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi it was suspicious that presidents’ preferred mode of communication was Twitter.
“They, tweet on the bird app with their left-wing, or right-wing politics, you know? I think a lot starts to unfold, and the matrix starts to shatter the more questions that you ask.”
The 60 Minutes segment aired footage from a recent Birds Aren’t Real rally in Hollywood attended by 200 self-described bird truthers who, all in on the act, protested the “bird drone surveillance crisis”.
The parodists called out the media’s “avian agenda” and accused CNN of being “pro-bird”.
Mr McIndoe later broke character to explain the point of the ruse.
“It’s taking this concept of misinformation and almost building a little safe space to come together within it and laugh at it, rather than be scared by it,” he told 60 Minutes.
“And accept the lunacy of it all and be a bird truther for a moment in time when everything’s so crazy.”
The team behind Birds Aren’t Real also features Cameron Kasky, a survivor of the 2018 Parkland school shooting, who has been since become a prominent gun control activist.
Mr Kasky, 21, co-founded the student-led gun violence prevention advocacy group Never Again MSD, and helped organise the March for Our Lives student protest in March 2018.
Mr Kasky has been accused of being a crisis actor and harassed by supporters of the QAnon conspiracy theory.
“I kinda had this strange perspective on conspiracy theories because the internet was telling me that my father and grandfather were child traffickers because they’re adoption lawyers,” he told 60 Minutes.
Birds Aren’t Real “chief of staff” Claire Chronis told the programme they were “fighting lunacy with lunacy”.
The parody social movement was first “outed” in the mainstream press by the New York Times in December.
Mr McIndoe had remained in character for years up until that point, and explained he was ready to come clean about the parody in case anyone started believing it was actually real.
“Dealing in the world of misinformation for the past few years, we’ve been really conscious of the line we walk,” he told the Times.
“The idea is meant to be so preposterous, but we make sure nothing we’re saying is too realistic. That’s a consideration with coming out of character.”
Birds Aren’t Real has more than 850,000 followers on TikTok, and 400,000 on Instagram.
