How social media can nudge people into becoming conspiracy theorists

By Matthew Sparkes

CLAMPING down on conspiracy theories may not help tackle extremist views online, instead it might cause them to proliferate.

Shruti Phadke at the University of Washington in Seattle and her colleagues analysed 6 million posts from 60,000 people on social news aggregation site Reddit, as well as their memberships of user-created communities called subreddits, in an attempt to identify the roots of online radicalisation. All the people’s profiles were roughly similar, but half of them were members of at least one subreddit focused on discussing political and scientific …