Chemtrails, Deepfakes and the Education Gap
- gamerschool0
- 5 days ago
- 11 min read
Why Our Children Need Critical Thinking More Than Ever
On the way home from school, a twelve-year-old glances up at the sky and sees white streaks trailing behind a jet. But the story doesn’t start there. It starts on their phone: a viral video claiming those trails are chemicals secretly sprayed by governments or corporations to control the weather, minds, or populations. Swipe again and Joe Rogan is speculating about hidden agendas. Swipe again and Tucker Carlson on X is turning geopolitics into a gripping tale of betrayal. Swipe again and Andrew Tate is telling boys the whole system is rigged and only he is brave enough to expose it.
By the time that child looks up at the real sky, the script is already written in their head. They don’t yet have the scientific knowledge to challenge it, or the critical thinking skills to ask, “What’s the evidence?” They like the video, the platform shows them ten more just like it, and slowly their “For You” page becomes an echo chamber of conspiracies—not because they went looking for them, but because they didn’t know how to question the first one.
For a huge number of young people, this is the default information environment.
The chemtrails conspiracy theory is just one tile in a much bigger mosaic. It is not the most dangerous idea out there. But it is a useful lens on a deeper problem:
We have given a generation constant access to content—conspiracies, half-truths, AI-generated images and videos—without giving them the tools to decide what is real, who to trust, or how to check.
At Gamer School, we think that gap is no longer a concern for the future. It is an emergency in the present.
What Is Actually Coming Out of Those Planes?
The science of what’s in the sky is fairly straightforward.
The white streaks behind high-flying aircraft are contrails – condensation trails. Jet engines burn fuel and produce gases including water vapour. At cruising altitude, the air is extremely cold and often close to saturation. The hot, moist exhaust meets this cold air, the water vapour condenses and freezes into billions of tiny ice crystals, and a thin artificial cloud is born. Depending on the humidity, that cloud may disappear quickly or spread and persist.
Supporters of the “chemtrails” theory argue that long-lasting or spreading contrails must be a deliberate chemical spray programme. But when atmospheric scientists have systematically examined the evidence presented by conspiracy theorists—photos of grids in the sky, claims about unusual chemical levels, patterns of contrails—they have been able to explain all of it using ordinary, well-understood physics and chemistry.
There is no credible scientific evidence that a secret, global spraying scheme is taking place. And in many ways, the logistics alone make it absurd.
To run a covert chemtrail operation at the scale claimed online, you would need:
Massive quantities of chemical agents, manufactured continuously.
Storage facilities at airports across the world.
Special tanks and plumbing on thousands of aircraft.
A supply chain of lorries, tankers and pumps refuelling those planes daily.
Maintenance crews, ground staff, engineers and pilots all trained to handle and hide the system.
Safety documentation, procurement contracts, shipping records and waste management.
All of that would need to be coordinated across international borders, hundreds of airlines and multiple governments, for years, without a single credible whistle-blower emerging with hard evidence.
It strains belief. Conspiracies of this scale leak. And crucially, every apparent “piece of evidence” for chemtrails has been examined and explained by independent scientists using standard atmospheric science.
So the interesting question isn’t “Are chemtrails real?” The interesting question is “Why is this myth so attractive to young people—and what does that say about our education system?”
A Generation Immersed in Conspiracies
There is a comforting story adults tell themselves: that conspiracies are something fringe, something “other people” fall for.
But recent research suggests teenagers are more likely than adults to endorse multiple conspiracy statements. A 2023 US study found that 60% of teens aged 13–17 agreed with at least four conspiratorial claims, compared with 49% of adults. Among teens who spend a lot of time on social media, that figure rose to nearly 70%.
In the UK, teachers report pupils repeating online conspiracies in lessons, alongside misogynistic talking points from influencers like Andrew Tate. One review of evidence submitted to Parliament found that around 42% of children aged 9–16 held neutral or favourable views of Tate, with older boys particularly influenced.
Separate surveys suggest that over half of 6–15-year-olds have heard of Tate at all, with awareness among boys aged 13–15 climbing above 80%. At the same time, nearly four in five young people globally (15–24) are now online.
When you combine:
near-universal connectivity
algorithmic feeds tuned to keep attention, not protect truth
charismatic hosts who blend entertainment with speculation
polarising political storytellers who’ve moved from cable into the unregulated spaces of X and subscription streaming
and influencers who explicitly tell boys that teachers and parents are lying, and only they are honest
…you get a powerful alternative curriculum: a shadow education that runs in parallel with school.
Chemtrails is one of many ideas pupils encounter there. Some are silly. Some are corrosive. Some are actively dangerous.
The point is not that schools must debunk every specific theory one by one. The point is that we are sending children into this environment with almost no systematic training in how to think within it.
The Next Wave: Deepfakes and the Crisis of “Seeing Is Believing”
The chemtrails myth is largely built from ordinary video footage of the sky plus a story placed on top. But the information landscape is changing again.
We are entering a world of synthetic media: AI-generated images, videos and voices that are increasingly difficult to distinguish from reality.
Deepfake tools can now create realistic videos of public figures saying things they never said. Research shows that such videos can increase deception and erode trust in news even when viewers are later told they were fake.
Government and education bodies are warning that synthetic media and deepfakes can fuel misinformation, manipulate elections, and generate abusive content—while also making people more likely to dismiss real evidence as “fake” whenever it is inconvenient.
We are moving from:
“This video proves I’m right.”to“No video proves anything, because it could all be fake.”
For young people, that is a confusing place to live. Either everything is true, or nothing is. Either you trust the first confident voice you hear, or you trust nobody at all.
Without explicit, repeated teaching in how to evaluate information—visual, verbal, algorithmic—we are leaving pupils to navigate this alone.
Algorithms, Echo Chambers and the Illusion of “Research”
One of the most common phrases we see from teenagers online is: “Do your own research.”
In principle, that’s exactly what we want. In practice, “research” often means:
Type your existing suspicion into a search bar.
Watch the first few videos that agree with you.
Let the platform recommend more of the same.
Take the resulting pile of confirmation as proof.
Recommendation systems on platforms like TikTok, YouTube and X are designed to maximise watch time. If a young person watches one chemtrail video all the way through, the algorithm is more likely to suggest another. If they pause on a Tate clip, more “manosphere” content is queued up.
Over time, this can create an echo chamber: a personalised universe where everything seems to confirm the same worldview. To a teenager inside that bubble, the sense of “I’ve seen loads of evidence” feels very real. They genuinely have watched dozens of clips, all pointing in the same direction.
What they often haven’t done is:
sought out high-quality sources that might disagree;
checked whether a claim appears in peer-reviewed research as well as memes;
investigated who is behind a website and what they stand to gain;
traced an image or video back to its original context;
compared coverage across outlets with different biases.
Those are learnable skills. But we are not, in general, teaching them consistently, early enough, or with enough rigour.
What Traditional School Still Gets Wrong
To be fair to schools, many teachers see this problem clearly. There are excellent media literacy projects, pockets of PSHE or citizenship lessons on misinformation, and staff doing heroic work countering conspiracies, misogyny and extremism in their classrooms.
But structurally, the system is still built for a different era.
It assumes:
Knowledge is relatively stable and delivered from the front of the room.
The central task is to remember enough facts to perform in an exam.
Digital literacy is an add-on, often squeezed into a few assemblies or a one-off safer-internet week.
Meanwhile, the average pupil’s real education about politics, gender, science and the future is happening in a personalised media feed after 10pm.
We are, as the cliché goes, bringing a highlighter pen to a house fire.
If we are serious about preparing children for the twenty-first century, we have to treat critical thinking and digital discernment as core subjects, not electives.
What Pupils Actually Need to Learn
If we strip the problem back to first principles, pupils growing up in a chemtrails-and-deepfakes world need at least four intertwined abilities.
1. Knowing how knowledge works
They need to understand:
the difference between anecdote and data;
how scientific claims are tested, challenged and refined over time;
why peer review and replication matter;
what counts as a good explanation (coherent, predictive, consistent with other well-established results).
Without that, “I saw a video” and “this has been examined by hundreds of scientists over decades” feel like similar kinds of evidence.
2. Practical verification habits
They need simple, repeatable habits such as:
pausing when something is shocking or emotionally charged;
checking whether a claim appears on trusted, independent sites;
using lateral reading: opening new tabs, seeing what others say about the source;
tracing images and videos back to their first appearance;
asking, “What evidence would change my mind?” before diving in.
These are not innate. They are practices that can be trained, just like long division or grammar.
3. Algorithmic self-awareness
Pupils should know, at a practical level:
that platforms learn from their behaviour and feed them more of what holds their attention;
that watch time is not the same as truth;
that seeking out diverse sources is a deliberate act, not something the feed will do for them;
that feeling like “everyone knows this” can be manufactured by an echo chamber.
4. Intellectual character
Finally, they need dispositions:
curiosity rather than cynicism;
the courage to say “I don’t know yet”;
humility about their own blind spots;
a commitment to fairness—representing opposing views in good faith before criticising them.
These are the qualities that allow a young person to hear a charismatic podcaster, a radical influencer or a polished AI-generated video and still keep thinking.
How Gamer School Turns Claims Like “Chemtrails” into Lessons
Gamer School exists because we don’t believe tinkering at the edges of the current system is enough. Our whole model is built around helping pupils become independent, critical thinkers who enjoy the process of figuring things out.
A claim like “chemtrails” is exactly the sort of real-world example we use to show pupils how to think, rather than what to think.
In a typical Gamer School lesson, pupils might first encounter a short, dramatic video very similar to what they see on TikTok. We don’t begin by announcing that it’s wrong. We start with questions: What do you notice? What is this video trying to make you feel? What is it asking you to believe?
From there, we guide them to imagine: If this claim were true, what patterns would we expect to see in the real world? They begin to propose testable ideas—health impacts under flight paths, whistle-blowers coming forward, leaked documents, unusual modifications to commercial jets, chemical purchasing on a vast scale. In other words, they start to think like scientists and investigators, not spectators.
Next comes the hard work of verification. Using curated resources—explanations of contrails from aviation and atmospheric science, discussions of how large conspiracies tend to leak, examples of good evidence versus weak—they compare what the video says with what robust sources show. Along the way, they learn how to search beyond the first page of results, how to read about a source as well as from it, and how to tell the difference between a question, a hypothesis and a conclusion.
Only then do we zoom out to the system itself. Pupils examine how algorithms suggest similar content once you like or watch a particular video, how influencers turn uncertainty into confident narratives, and how quickly a personal “For You” page can become an echo chamber. They see that it isn’t just about one theory in the sky; it’s about the machinery that shapes what they see every day.
Finally, instead of stopping at critique, they create. They might script a short video, design a simple game, or write a dialogue between a believer and a sceptic. The rule is simple: every claim must be backed by evidence, and every source must be something someone else can check. Creation becomes the proof that they’ve understood the difference between “I saw it online” and “I’ve actually looked into this.”
And this approach doesn’t stand alone. It runs alongside other Gamer School strands:
In our Fact or Fiction units, pupils take apart stories about figures like Columbus or Van Gogh, separating myth from evidence.
In our Heroes quests, they grapple with real-world problems such as air pollution, AI or urban planning, and must defend their choices with data, not slogans.
In our Learnalong videos and games, they watch us think out loud, change our minds when the evidence demands it, and model the intellectual honesty we want them to develop.
Across all of it, the message is consistent: your mind is not a bucket to be filled with answers. It is a tool for interrogating the world.
Why This Matters for Parents and Teachers Now
For parents, the temptation is to ban, block or police every corner of the internet. For teachers, the temptation is to hope that someone else is handling it—safeguarding leads, PSHE coordinators, the next government initiative.
Some boundaries and regulations are essential. But no technical filter will ever be enough on its own. There will always be a new platform, a new influencer, a new kind of synthetic media.
The only sustainable defence is education that treats critical thinking, digital discernment and first-principles reasoning as central, not peripheral.
That is what Gamer School is trying to build: an education that matches the world our children actually inhabit, not the one our textbooks were written for.
A Final Thought – and an Invitation
The chemtrails conspiracy will rise and fall like many before it. Something else will replace it: another story that flatters our suspicions, dramatises our fears, and offers simple villains.
What doesn’t change is the need for young people who can pause before they share, ask better questions than “Is this true?”, and seek out evidence with patience and courage.
If you want your children—or your pupils—to grow up with that kind of mind, we’d love you to journey with us.
Gamer School is building:
online quests and lessons grounded in real problems,
AI-guided discussions that challenge rather than simply answer,
a culture where curiosity, rigour and independence are normal.
If this resonates, share it with someone who needs to read it. And if you want to help us build this new kind of education from the ground up:
Become a Gamer School Founder.
Founders are the first to say, “We can do better than this,” and to act on it.
Sources & Further Reading
Study of atmospheric scientists debunking “chemtrails” claims and explaining alleged evidence with standard atmospheric science. UC Irvine News+3University of California+3Carnegie Science+3
Royal Aeronautical Society explainer on contrails and how they are confused with “chemtrails.” Royal Aeronautical Society
Research showing that around 60% of US teens (13–17) endorsed four or more conspiracy statements, compared with 49% of adults. The Guardian+1
Evidence submissions and polling on Andrew Tate’s influence over children and young men in the UK. The Guardian+5YouGov+5UK Parliament Committees+5
Analyses of Tucker Carlson’s move from Fox News to X and subscription streaming, and his continued reach online. Reuters+3Forbes+3X (formerly Twitter)+3
UN and UK sources on youth internet use, online conspiracies in schools and the need for media literacy. United Nations+2counteringconspiracies.publicfirst.co.uk+2
Research on deepfakes, synthetic media and the implications for misinformation and trust in news. k12dive.com+5GOV.UK+5UNESCO+5
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