Fighting Conspiracy Theories Online at Scale

Bibliographic Data

ID5948804
AuthorsRebekah Su Park (0000-0001-9666-6293), Rebekah Park (Gemic), David Zax (ReD Associates), David B Zax, Benjamin Goldberg (0000-0002-8636-6702), Beth Goldberg (Jigsaw)
Year2020
Volume2020
Issue1
Pages265-278
Publication date2020-10-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEthnographic Praxis in Industry Conference Proceedings (CONFERENCE)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1559-890X • E-ISSN: 1559-8918
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/epic.12036
OpenAlexW3117123437
LanguageEN
References cited16

This 2019 project conducted in the US and the UK sought to understand which conspiracy theories are harmful and which are benign, with an eye towards finding ways to combat disinformation and extremism. This case study demonstrates how ethnographic methods led to insights on what "triggered" conspiracy belief, the social and emotional roles conspiracy theories played in believers' lives, and how conspiracy belief was often a reflection of a person's sense of societal alienation. We discovered that any extreme interpretation of a conspiracy theory could be harmful. The findings of this project changed how the client -- and by extension the developers behind major tech platforms -- understood harmful conspiracy-related content. The aim of this project was to inform how to scale and amplify the work of individual conspiracy debunkers

Alienation · Disinformation · Epistemology · Interpretation (philosophy · Political science · Scale (ratio · Social media · Sociology · Computer Science · Hate Speech and Cyberbullying Detection · Law · Misinformation and Its Impacts · Psychology · Social Media and Politics · Social Psychology

Tools

Open DOI