© Neil Armstrong/NASA / Reuters
An exhaustive new study has shed light on how conspiracy theories spread online and who actually believes them.
As conspiracy theories seem more widespread than ever, a team of Australian researchers tried to unravel why the often outlandish beliefs gain widespread appeal.
The researchers forensically examined every entry on the Reddit r/Conspiracy page from 2007 to 2015.
After separating the people who post on the page into various groups, the team was surprised to learn that the traditional 'monological' conspiracy theorists, who connect everything to everything else, only accounted for a small, but very vocal, proportion of the people who posted on the page.
"It is commonly believed that conspiracy believers tend to be the kind of people that connect every conspiracy to everything else, like the typical tin foil hat wearing stereotype," lead researcher Dr. Colin Klein
told the Australian news site News.com.au. "We found that there are those people, but they are the tip of a much larger iceberg."
Comment: Did they really need to make a study to figure out that not all conspiracy theorists are looneys? A much more interesting research question would have been: Why do so many people believe everything the mainstream media tells them? Here's a hint: