Six years ago, Peter McIndoe fell into character as the leader of the parody conspiracy theory called Birds Aren’t Real. On a whim, the now 24-year-old college dropout created a character who, at least publicly, espoused the belief that the US government murdered more than 12 billion birds between 1969 and 2001 and replaced them with robotic replicas designed to spy on the American people. …
TED 2023: How the “Birds Aren’t Real” Conspiracy Parody Became a Compassion Movement