It… actually looks like conspiracy theories are being spread by a conspiracy.

So much for using that as a wild story idea.

Originally shared by Yonatan Zunger

The dynamics of disinformation, propaganda, “fake news,” and conspiracy theories can be studied by watching how they spread. This is a summary of a scientific study (by one of its authors, who links the full paper) into this, and it’s chock-full of fascinating results. They focused on responses to mass shootings in particular, as these are a favorite target of conspiracy theories. Conspiracy stories, it turns out, spread with a very different pattern than other types of story – and botnets, quasi-replication of stories between sites, and similar patterns of signal manipulation are key to them. This (as well as other interesting commonalities between the sites which propagate these) suggests that there is something systematic and intentional behind these theories: they aren’t emerging organically, they’re being curated.