For most of his 40-year career, Carlos Moreno, a scientist and business professor in Paris, worked in relative peace.
Many cities around the world adopted a concept he began developing in 2010. Called the 15-minute city, the idea is that everyday destinations, such as schools, shops and offices, should be within walking or cycling distance of home. . Nearly 100 mayors around the world adopted it as a way to help recover from the pandemic.
Those who embrace conspiracy theories arrived late, but suddenly.
An avalanche of rumors and distortions have pointed to Moreno's idea. Fueled in part by climate change deniers and supporters of the QAnon conspiracy theory, false claims have circulated online, at protests, and even at government hearings that 15-minute cities were precursors to “climate lockdowns.” —urban “penal camps” in which residents' movements would be monitored and heavily restricted.
Many directly attacked Moreno, 63 years old. The professor, who teaches at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, faced harassment online and via email. He was accused of being an agent of an invisible totalitarian world government. He was compared to criminals and dictators. And he started receiving death threats.
“I was no longer a researcher, I was Pol Pot, Stalin, Hitler,” Moreno said. “I became, in one week, Public Enemy Number 1.”
For high-profile figures, misinformation and the hostility it can cause have been part of the job. But increasingly, even professors and researchers face intimidation from conspiracy theorists.
Many threats have been directed at scientists studying Covid-19. In a survey of 321 of those scientists who had given media interviews, Nature magazine found that 22 percent had received threats of physical or sexual violence and 15 percent had received death threats. Last year, an Austrian doctor who was a supporter of vaccines and a repeated target of threats committed suicide.
Moreno did not face harassment until conspiracy theorists mistakenly equated 15-minute cities with the idea of low-traffic neighborhoods in Britain. Efforts to adopt low-traffic areas, approved for trials last year in Oxford, have raised concerns about whether traffic-reducing measures could cause congestion to spill over into surrounding areas. But some focused on other elements of the plan, such as license plate monitoring cameras.
The result: a nightmare scenario in which residents would be confined to fenced open-air prisons in isolated areas. On February 18, when about 2,000 people protested in Oxford, some carried signs claiming that 15-minute cities would become “ghettos” created by the World Economic Forum as a form of “tyrannical control.”
Last year, the American Psychological Association suggested that universities create security offices to help professors filter threatening messages, clean up their personal information online and receive therapy.
“It is totally incredible that we can receive a death threat just for working as scientists,” Moreno said.
By: Tiffany Hsu
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6646657, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-04-05 20:50:09
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