Due to the Internet, conspiracy theories are on the rise and playing an increasingly significant role in global politics. Now new research from The Australian National University (ANU) has analysed digital data to reveal exactly who is propagating them and why.
Lead researcher Dr Colin Klein of the ANU School of Philosophy said that conspiracies such as Pizzagate (which falsely claimed high-ranking Democratic Party officials were running a child-sex ring out of a pizza shop) and the anti-vaccination movement are becoming a bigger issue.
Dr Klein and his team used a huge, publicly available dataset of every comment made on the conspiracy section of the world's largest discussion website Reddit from 2007 to mid-2015 to work out exactly who was taking part in spreading these conspiracies and why. He was surprised by the results.
The analysis showed that most conspiracies built traction when a range of different people and groups could connect it to their own preconceived beliefs or agendas.
http://www.anu.edu.au/news/all-news/anu-study-reveals-who-is-spreading-online-conspiracies
[Also Covered By]: Phys.org
[Paper]: Topic Modeling Reveals Distinct Interests within an Online Conspiracy Forum
Does Reddit seem like a good choice for this study?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 03 2018, @08:11PM (1 child)
Yeah. Who goes to r/conspiracy to spread conspiracy theories? That would be one place where everyone objectively believes it is a conspiracy theory.
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Tuesday April 03 2018, @10:07PM
It'd be far better to go to the moon to spread conspiracy theories. Except, of course, we never went to the moon...