Deepak Chopra’s Twitter Trolling Continues

Deepak Chopra is still trolling people on Twitter, it seems. On February 10th Professor Brian Cox appeared on Conan and related a familiar story about Chopra’s behavior. Watch the short clip:

As you may recall, last May I documented Deepak Chopra’s habit of trolling well-known skeptics and atheists on Twitter. He repeatedly taunts them, tweets links at them and makes snide or insulting remarks.

Among the things that make the behavior so blatant is Chopra includes Daniel Dennett and Jerry Coyne in his taunts. Dennett very rarely converses with anyone on Twitter, and never with Chopra.  Coyne has specifically stated on his blog that he never converses on Twitter at all – he just uses it to as an alternate blog feed. Chopra must know this. One can only conclude his one-sided conversations are an elaborate show for his own followers.

But some people do respond to Chopra, including Brian Cox as seen in the clip. (Their previous Twitter exchanges have been documented by Jerry Coyne on more than one occasion).

Incidentally, the angry tweet Cox mentions in the clip appears to have been deleted by Chopra. He does that a bit too, in my earlier post I document one tweet to me that he deleted. Tracking Chopra’s deleted tweets might be an interesting skeptic project.

After the program aired, this bizarre exchange occurred:

Where is @ProfBrianCox @TeamCoco pic.twitter.com/28Pb6QfUSv

— Deepak Chopra (@DeepakChopra) February 12, 2015

What the HOLY JESUS is this? RT @DeepakChopra: Where is @ProfBrianCox @TeamCoco pic.twitter.com/FVKEUDEqH0

— Dr Adam Rutherford (@AdamRutherford) February 12, 2015

@AdamRutherford @DeepakChopra @TeamCoco I have no idea, but I'm having it made into wallpaper for my under-stairs bathroom.

— Brian Cox (@ProfBrianCox) February 12, 2015

Misleading posts in Deepak Chopra’s Twitter feed verge on trolling

Deepak Chopra, photo by Mitchell Aidelbaum licensed under a CC BY-SA 2.0 license.

Susan Gerbic contacted me the other day. She was confused by an unsolicited message she had received from none other than Deepak Chopra on Twitter. To save you the click – it’s just a bare URL in a tweet, no other explanation. Presumably Chopra wants Susan to read that blog post?

More on that later, but I told Susan I’d seen odd behavior before in Chopra’s Twitter feed. He sometimes seems almost obsessed with the idea of getting those who criticize him to read his columns and blog posts. I had made a note to myself to investigate this as part of my bad behavior series. I thought it would be an interesting follow up to my previous post about Deepak Chopra’s employee acting as his sock-puppet on Wikipedia.

It used to be that digging around in old tweets was very difficult, because Twitter’s search function only went back a few weeks. But last year Twitter enhanced search to include years of old tweets. Using Twitter’s advanced search function (which has also been recently enhanced), I dug deeper into Chopra’s Twitter feed to see how often he does things like this.

What emerges is a sad pattern of a man who has almost 2 million followers (and a verified account!) acting as if it is vitally important his followers see that he is debating with certain key atheists on Twitter. He also seems bizarrely obsessed with getting certain people to read his blog. In the process I believe he’s skirting the Twitter rules on spam, and encouraging bad behavior in some of his co-authors as well.

So let’s use that enhanced Twitter search and look a little deeper….

Quantum variations in Wikipedia rules – Deepak Chopra and conflict of interest

Skeptical editing of Wikipedia has gotten some attention in the media lately. I covered part of it in my piece on skeptic complaints. I am working on a longer post that digs into the entire history of how Rupert Sheldrake and a handful of paranormal bloggers created this manufactroversy. (Spoiler alert: it’s largely due to misunderstandings of how Wikipedia works).

But before we get to that, how about an entertaining side drama involving Deepak Chopra?

Early in November, Deepak Chopra used his column on SFGate (cross-posted to his blog and elsewhere) to add his voice to the chorus coming from the Sheldrake camp. The multi-part post quickly branched into a variety of criticisms of skepticism in general, but that first post on November 3rd devoted a number of paragraphs to the false accusation that skeptics in general (and Susan Gerbic’s Guerrilla Skeptics in particular) were responsible for a “concerted attack” on Sheldrake’s biography. Steven Novella and Jerry Coyne both replied to Chopra on their blogs.  Coyne also reiterated his points in an expanded article on The New Republic and sparked a rather hilarious (and fallacy-laden) reply by Chopra.

Susan Gerbic and I have appeared together on both the Skepticality and the Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe podcasts to state our side of the story.

A few days after Deepak’s original post, an interesting footnote to this drama played out deep in the recesses of Wikipedia’s administrative pages. I mentioned it on Skepticality, but it hasn’t been covered in news media so far as I have seen. It involves a pseudonymous editor, a quickly retracted open letter by Chopra, and a blatant five-year abuse of Wikipedia’s clearly stated conflict-of-interest rules.

Chopra is legendary for applying quantum physics anywhere and everywhere he can make it fit in. At the end of this, you’ll wonder if perhaps he (or his staff) believes that quantum mechanics applies to ethics rules as well. Read on for more…