Conspiracy

Burden of the Beast

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Creating Conspiracy Beliefs: How Our Thoughts Are Shaped

#FreeBritney and the Pleasures of Conspiracy

Henrik Ibsen and Conspiracy Thinking: The Case of <i>Peer Gynt</i>

Editorial—The truth is out there: The psychology of conspiracy theories and how to counter them

The novel coronavirus 2019 pandemic has brought about an overabundance of misinformation concerning the virus (SARS-CoV-2) and the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) it causes spreading rapidly on social media. While some more obviously untrustworthy sources may be easier for social media filters to identify and remove, an early feature was the cobranding of COVID-19 misinformation with other types of misinformation. To examine this, the top 10 Instagram posts (in English) were collected every day for 10 days (April 21-30th, 2020) for each of the hashtags #hoax, #governmentlies, and #plandemic. The #hoax was selected first as it is commonly used in conspiracy theory posts, and #governmentlies because it was the most commonly cotagged with #hoax. For comparison, we selected #plandemic as the most popular cotagged hashtag that was clearly COVID-19-related. This resulted in 300 Instagram posts available for our analysis. We conducted a content analysis by coding the themes contained in the posts, both for the images and the text caption shared by the Instagram users (including hashtags). The broad theme of general mistrust was the most common, including the idea that the government and/or media has fabricated or hidden information pertaining to COVID-19. Conspiracy theories were the second-most frequent theme among posts. Overall, COVID-19 was frequently presented in association with authority-questioning beliefs. Developing an understanding of how the public shares misinformation on COVID-19 alongside conspiracy theories and authority-questioning statements can aid public health officials and policymakers in limiting the spread of potentially life-threatening health misinformation.

Numerous studies find associations between social media use and beliefs in conspiracy theories and misinformation. While such findings are often interpreted as evidence that social media causally promotes conspiracy beliefs, we theorize that this relationship is conditional on other individual-level predispositions. Across two studies, we examine the relationship between beliefs in conspiracy theories and media use, finding that individuals who get their news from social media and use social media frequently express more beliefs in some types of conspiracy theories and misinformation. However, we also find that these relationships are conditional on conspiracy thinking––the predisposition to interpret salient events as products of conspiracies––such that social media use becomes more strongly associated with conspiracy beliefs as conspiracy thinking intensifies. This pattern, which we observe across many beliefs from two studies, clarifies the relationship between social media use and beliefs in dubious ideas.Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11109-021-09734-6.

Social media has been an effective vector for spreading disinformation about medicine and science. Informational hygiene can reduce the severity of falsehoods about health.

How Google Autocomplete Algorithms about Conspiracy Theorists Mislead the Public

This chapter discusses how media use changes when everyday life undergoes change, focusing on major life transitions. I briefly introduce different perspectives on evolving media repertoires across the life course, and argue for the relevance of studying periods of destabilization and reorientation, when elements of media repertoires and modes of public connection are temporarily or more permanently transformed. I argue that easily adaptable media technologies such as smartphones tend to become more important in unsettled circumstances, as easy-to-reach for tools for new forms of self-expression, information-seeking or social contact, in accordance with shifting social roles and everyday circumstances. The primary empirical material analyzed in the chapter is a small qualitative interview study with mothers, about their media use the first year with a new-born.

Playing Conspiracy

media technologies [have] altered infrastructures and rhythms of everyday (Horst, 2012, p. 62) - this is true not only for technology-driven metropolitan areas in Eeast Asia or USA, but also, and particularly, for those Southeast Asian countries that hold some of largest numbers of social media users in world. Yet, contrary to popular expectations of an interconnected global network society (Castells, 1996), a number of ethnographic studies have exposed rather unorthodox ways in which digital technologies have become part of daily dynamics of social, cultural, and political life that depend largely on particular regional settings, infrastructures, offline relationships, and other aspects of locality (Hine, 2000, p. 27; Horst, 2013, pp. 149-151; Horst & Miller, 2006; Madianou & Miller, 2012; Miller, 2011; Miller & Slater, 2000; Postill, 2011; ,h Servaes, 2014; Slater, 2013). Focusing on New Media in Southeast Asia, this issue contributes to this project of provincializing (Coleman, 2010, p. 489) digital media, particularly social media, by following ways in which people go about organizing their social, cultural, and political lives in largely institutionalized and conflict-laden environments.Directing their focus toward political participation of urban middle classes ses in authoritarian and post-authoritarian regimes, authors of this special issue explore ways in which different actors set parameters for participation in digital space, and seize digital media for their socio-political and cultural agendas. This approach allows them to avoid media-centric generalizations and various forms of technological determinism associated with early work of media theorist Marshall McLuhan and others (Baym, 2015, pp. 27-44). Without disregarding importance of external forces, such as political centralization, bureaucratization, and urbanization, as well as their regional particularities, contributions place a strong emphasis on agency of Internet users. Hence, digital media feed into, reflect, and shape symbolic struggles over perception of social world (Bourdieu, 1989, p. 20) by allowing for new types of exchange and socialities to emerge across gap between virtual and ® actual (Boellstorff, 2012, p.While contributions to this issue deploy terms digital and social media by addressing concrete, non-analog technologies and applications, such as Internet or Facebook, term new media is rarely discussed in detail. Inquiring what makes new media new, llana Gershon (2010, p. 10) goes well beyond factual innovations introduced by what we know today as Web 2.0 (O'Reilly, 2007; see also Ellison & boyd, 2013). Rather than technologies she argues, it is people's perceptions of and experiences with social media (e.g., Facebook or Instagram) that define them as new. Internet users, as Hine (2000) poses in her book Virtual Ethnography, are involved in construction of digital technology both practices by which they understand it and through content they produce (p. 38). Once embedded in everyday practices, new media and their accompanying infrastructures may appear mundane and transparent to users. Yet, emerging forms of social interaction through and with digital media do not go without a fair amount of anxieties related to these media (Baym, 2015, p. 22; Gershon, 2010, pp. 80-81), as they potentially challenge previously established technologies and patterns of exchange (Campbell, 2010, p. 9).Madianou and Miller (2011) encountered similar suspicion among Filipino domestic workers in London who today could be defined as the real vanguard troops in marching towards digital future (Miller & Horst, 2012, p. 10). Formulating their concept of polymedia, authors explore ways in which diverse media contribute to emotional repertoire of Filipino mothers in their communication with their children back in Philippines. …

“Conspiracy theory”: The case for being critically receptive

Focused on the mathematical foundations of social media analysis, Graph-Based Social Media Analysis provides a comprehensive introduction to the use of graph analysis in the study of social and digital media. It addresses an important scientific and technological challenge, namely the confluence of graph analysis and network theory with linear algebra, digital media, machine learning, big data analysis, and signal processing. Supplying an overview of graph-based social media analysis, the book provides readers with a clear understanding of social media structure. It uses graph theory, particularly the algebraic description and analysis of graphs, in social media studies. The book emphasizes the big data aspects of social and digital media. It presents various approaches to storing vast amounts of data online and retrieving that data in real-time. It demystifies complex social media phenomena, such as information diffusion, marketing and recommendation systems in social media, and evolving systems. It also covers emerging trends, such as big data analysis and social media evolution. Describing how to conduct proper analysis of the social and digital media markets, the book provides insights into processing, storing, and visualizing big social media data and social graphs. It includes coverage of graphs in social and digital media, graph and hyper-graph fundamentals, mathematical foundations coming from linear algebra, algebraic graph analysis, graph clustering, community detection, graph matching, web search based on ranking, label propagation and diffusion in social media, graph-based pattern recognition and machine learning, graph-based pattern classification and dimensionality reduction, and much more. This book is an ideal reference for scientists and engineers working in social media and digital media production and distribution. It is also suitable for use as a textbook in undergraduate or graduate courses on digital media, social media, or social networks.