Before a storm, the calm; after the storm, a hail of conspiracy theories. The urge to seek truth among unconnected dots is nothing new, but social media has supercharged that urge, ratcheting up the speed and spread of the resulting theories. As soon as a scrap of news hits Twitter, thousands upon thousands of users across multiple platforms swarm to synthesize it with other, unrelated scraps—even if fusing them into a coherent narrative requires logical backflips and manufacturing some data points of their own. And once the conspiracy has been constructed, no amount of well-intentioned debunkings can shake these truthers’ faith.
But who are these conspiracy-minded internet sleuths spreading misinformation? Where do they come from? Where do they go once the furor around a crisis has cooled? And more importantly, how can the rational citizens of the internet help snap them back to a reality devoid of lizard people and shadowy baby-stealing organizations? Those are the questions Virginia Tech researchers Mattia Samory and Tanushree Mitra, who study deviant behavior in online discussions, tried to answer by analyzing a decade's worth of Reddit conspiracy talk.
In a new study being presented today, Samory and Mitra share their findings after watching chatter on r/conspiracy and related subreddits. What they found, though, is that not all Reddit conspiracy theorists are alike—and in fact, the most fervent among them might be the easiest to deradicalize.
Samory and Mitra’s study honed in on the conspiracy theories around four different major crises: the Boston bombing, the Sandy Hook and Aurora shootings, and the disappearance of Malaysian Air flight MH17. They found that not only do crises reinforce and increase the numbers of conspiracy communities—the combination of emotions running high and scant verifiable information seems to send many hunting for answers—but also that the approximately six million users posting conspiracy content during these crises tended to fall into three categories. First, there were the veterans, the long-term, single-minded r/conspiracy users. Then there were the converts: folks who were already active elsewhere on Reddit, but poked their heads into conspiracy subreddits once the crisis arose. And then there joiners, who only became Reddit users in the wake of the crisis and posted almost exclusively on conspiracy subreddits.
The researchers found that, while all three categories may be active at once, they demonstrate significantly different online behavior. Despite often being prolific Redditors, converts sink the least effort into conspiracy theorizing, often repeating the same small point over and over. They also tend to express more skepticism over time, and tend not to become long-term conspiracy subreddit users. (Knowing Reddit, it seems plausible that a portion of these converts may be indulging in ironic trolling.) Joiners and veterans are the ones who move conspiracies theories forward—offering the most verbose and least repetitive responses and demonstrating the highest levels of engagement with the conspiracy within (and, for veterans, outside) r/conspiracy.
Of the three category profiles, it's the joiners who surprised the researchers most—and are likely to prove most important. “We expected them to be mostly skeptical people testing the waters,” Samory says. “But they actually had the most continuous involvement in the community and had increasing involvement in other conspiracy theories.” Joiners, it turns out, are also the most likely to become veterans, likely for the same reason that veterans return for crisis after crisis. If you self-select to only be exposed to a small subset of viewpoints and information, you’re putting yourself in the position to be radicalized. That’s less likely to happen to converts, who generally were engaged in multiple different subreddits.
This is by no means a complete picture of the dynamics of online conspiracy theories, but the study does suggest a possible course of action for deradicalizing some participants. “A good course of action to mitigate the problem is to catch new conspiracy theorists early," Samory says. "They’re the fastest to radicalize, they’re the ones that remain the most engaged, but they also have the highest amount of distrust during the crisis." In other words, debunking efforts should focus on these newbie joiners.
That's especially urgent when, as in these circles, an appetizer tends to lead to an all-you-can-eat binge. “Once we start believing in one conspiracy theory, it’s easy to believe in multiple [theories]," Samory says. "And that leads to the rejection of attacks on any conspiracy theory, and the belief that those correction attempts are part of the conspiracy.” It's a short walk from false flags to "crisis actors"—and from there, Pizzagate and full-on Alex Jones-ville aren't far behind.
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