How Conspiracy Theories Go Viral

The baffling case of the disappearing Malaysia Airlines plane has been a breeding ground for wacky theories and conspiracies over the last week: That the plane was testing cloaking technology, was hijacked by China, was shot down by North Korea, was shot down by the US, was stolen, time-traveled back to the 70s and was reverse-engineered to create the original 777, was taken by aliens and is currently on Mars, or is hiding in Pakistan "like Bin Laden," to name a few.

It’s just the latest incident to garner this kind of wild speculation. Since the advent of the web and explosion of social media, unsubstantiated claims, false reports, and conspiracies both reasonable and ridiculous, tend to spread like wildfire, reverberating through the internet echo chamber and picking up steam along the way until truth and nonsense are indistinguishable. Indeed, last year a World Economic Forum report listed "massive digital misinformation" as one of the main risks for modern-day society.

And so a team of researchers at Northeastern University, led by Walter Quattrociocchi, decided to study how it is that erroneous information jumps the credibility fence and becomes widely believed to be true. Their theory, published on the arXiv preprint server last week and unearthed by MIT Technology Review, is that it has something to do with the kind of people who read "alternative" news, because they're generally mistrustful of the mainstream media.

The team studied some 2 million Facebook users to see how they interacted with various pieces of content about the 2013 political election in Italy—stories from traditional news sites, alternative publications, and niche political ​sites. They then interjected 2,788 untrue or satirical "troll" posts to compare.

The researchers found that people engaged with the bunk posts even more and for even longer than the accurate reports, and they wound up triggering several viral stories, underlining "the effect of Facebook on bursting the diffusion of false beliefs when truthful and untruthful rumors coexist,” the report states.

Logically enough, the folks who were more prone to reading alternative websites (defined as "pages which disseminate controversial information, most often lacking supporting evidence and sometimes contradictory of the official news") were also more likely to buy into a conspiracy theory. The thinking goes that those radical readers are A) ​less adept at parsing accurate information and B) already skeptical of mainstream journalism, and looking for an different take.

“Surprisingly, consumers of alternative news, which are the users trying to avoid the mainstream media ‘mass-manipulation’, are the most responsive to the injection of false claims,” the researchers wrote. I have no idea why they found that surprising.

Of course, there are other factors going into what makes a false claim spread through the web. If it germinates from a niche social network of like-minded people, like a forum or subreddit, it's more likely to believed by the people within that community, and the peers that comment on the content give more weight to the information.

It's also only natural that people are more likely to share a story that’s shocking or gets them riled up and mad as hell, as conspiracies are wont to do, true or not. Someone just has to plant the seed, and skeptics already prone to hanging out on the fringes of the discussion will egg it along, maybe a "legit" site will pick it up or a thought leader will comment on it, and as the information snowballs, more and more people start believing it’s true, or at least a possible truth.

That's one theory, anyway.