Rarely have conspiracy theories and their dangers been so much in the spotlight. From the “stolen election” (coming from Donald Trump and his insurrectionist acolytes who stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021), vaccines and COVID-19, QAnon and flat earth theories, to invented claims that prominent women are really men, wild assertions about eclipses, […]
As the war between Israel and Hamas has intensified in Gaza, disinformation and conspiracy theories about the conflict have been increasingly circulating on social media. At least that’s what I found in my analysis of some 12,000 comments posted on Telegram channels in the immediate aftermath of Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel. Not surprisingly, […]
People can be prone to believe in conspiracy theories due to a combination of personality traits and motivations, including relying strongly on their intuition, feeling a sense of antagonism and superiority toward others, and perceiving threats in their environment, according to research published by the American Psychological Association. The results of the study paint a […]
There is an open question among pundits and researchers: Do more Americans believe in conspiracy theories now than ever before? But as a scholar of conspiracy theories and their believers, I am concerned that focusing on how many Americans believe conspiracy theories can distract from their dangers. Even if most people dismiss conspiracy theories or […]
Conspiracy Watch: Since you wrote your book Voodoo Histories, about conspiracy theories, back in 2009, would you say the phenomenon has grown in size? Why? David Aaronovitch: Obviously, the Internet has played a key role in the creation and spreading of various conspiracy theories. People discovered websites that had the appearance of scholarliness, with footnotes and […]
Tenou'a: Let’s first define the terms: what is conspiracism – what in French we call conspirationnisme or complotisme? Rudy Reichstadt: These two words entered the dictionary in French in 2011 and 2016 respectively. In reality, conspirationnisme has been in use since the 1980s. The term théorie du complot is older; it was first used in […]
