2 Ways Social Media Propels Conspiracy Theories

It is tailor-made for them.

Below is an excerpt from my book Terms of Service, which was published earlier this year. I hope it is helpful for you.

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Our desire to pursue comfort at the cost of truth is not new, but social media has made it much easier to hold tightly to a false narrative than it was to do so previously. Conspiracy theories existed long before the prevalence of the social internet, but it is foolish to deny that social media adds gasoline to the kindling fire of conspiracy theories.

Max Read writes for New York magazine, “The intimate stage of social media, where vloggers and citizen journalists peddle theories without the baggage of these corrupted institutions, can appear to its users particularly direct, honest, and unmediated.” A simple understanding of the algorithms and other systems that make the social internet work leads to the undeniable conclusion that these platforms support the wildfire-like spread of conspiracy theories. Undergirding any “successful” conspiracy theory that gains traction online are two primary ingredients: (1) a lot of falsehoods (or “fake news”) built on (2) an acorn of truth. Like every good lie, every good conspiracy theory is built on a small truth.

Social media has created an environment in which the falsehoods upon which a conspiracy theory is built spread a lot quicker than the small bit of
truth on which it is built. Let’s explore the two basic elements of the social internet environment that makes it so easy for conspiracy theories (and other types
of fake news) to spread.

1. Like-minded Connection

The natural proclivity of almost everyone is to use social media to connect with others who think like we do. It would be great if it was natural for us to gravitate toward people with whom we disagree as quickly as we do to those with whom we agree, but we just don’t. We primarily use social media to connect with people who have the same political, religious, and broadly ideological beliefs that we do.

It is normal that someone like me, an American Christian, would more frequently use social media to connect with other American Christians than a French Muslim or an Indian Hindu. This isn’t necessarily bad; it’s just how humans are. We are tribal. Where this gets us into trouble, though, is when it creates a sort of tunnel-vision effect in which we are unable to see the world through the eyes of people who think, live, and believe differently than we do. This makes us prone to believe whatever our like-minded friends and family share on social media, without testing it against a reliable source of facts and information.

Social media is not designed for empathy, as I explained before. We only know what the world looks like from our virtual perch, and when we connect with a bunch of people who believe the same way we do, we are likely to have trouble discerning what is fact and what is our tribe’s interpretation of fact, which may end up being more fictional than factual. This, naturally, makes us more likely to believe a conspiracy theory, however outlandish it may sound. We trust people who look, think, and live like us, and the internet has connected us to those kinds of people.

2. Quick, Engaging Content

When we’re scrolling on our preferred social media platform, we like to consume a lot of content in a short period of time. We like short videos. We like clever memes. We like reading headlines.

Most of us, when we’re scrolling social media, don’t stop to click a link and read an article before we like it or comment on it. This is a pet peeve of many social media managers who receive hateful comments from people who don’t like the headline of an article and respond negatively without reading it (especially when doing so would probably reveal much that they like and agree with!).¹ These methods of content consumption set us up to be duped by deceiving headlines or outright false information.

Let’s dive deeper into this by looking at Facebook because: (1) it’s the most popular social media platform in the world, and (2) it’s where conspiracy theories tend to spread most frequently online. Remember, Facebook’s number one goal is to make money, and they do that by collecting as much of our attention as they can and delivering ads in our news feeds.

In the business of monetizing our attention, Facebook does not have a preference toward serving us content that makes us happy or makes us mad. It just wants to make us feel something. Facebook doesn’t care if you share a funny video that made you laugh or spend ten minutes typing an angry comment on a post you hated. It’s all the same to Facebook because it kept your attention. The worst kind of content, in Facebook’s eyes, is boring content. Content that makes you feel and act, whether in happiness or anger, is good; content that leaves you bored and scrolling, or leaving the site entirely, is bad.

Enter: conspiratorial content.

Conspiracy theory content is inherently polarizing and provocative. It’s a sure bet to make you feel something. Facebook users are likely to engage with conspiracy theory content because they either find it reprehensible or agree with it.

The environment created by social internet platforms is a perfect environment for conspiracy theories to spread, even if the platforms would prefer they not spread at all. You simply cannot create a platform that monetizes data and attention and prevent the spread of attention-getting, emotion-inducing content. It’s like hosting a birthday party with a bunch of teenage boys, laden with Mountain Dew and junk food. You may not host the party with the intent of replacing breakable objects in your house, but you’re still probably going to have to do that. The creators of the social internet didn’t set out to create an environment ripe for conspiracy theories to spread, but they have nonetheless.

Connecting the dots between “how social media works” and “why conspiracy theories spread” is not difficult. Conspiracy theories generate attention and engagement. Because conspiracy theories generate attention and engagement, they show up on a lot of feeds, and the result is a snowballing effect.

(Again, this is from my book Terms of Service, which you can purchase by clicking this link if you found the above helpful.)

1. (not that this has ever happened to me…)