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ScienceDirect

Review

Conspiracy theories and social media platforms

Matteo Cinelli1, Gabriele Etta1, Michele Avalle1,
Alessandro Quattrociocchi1, Niccolò Di Marco2,
Carlo Valensise3, Alessandro Galeazzi4 and
Walter Quattrociocchi1

Conspiracy Theories, Social Media Platforms, Polarization,

Abstract
Echo Platforms.
Conspiracy theories proliferate online. We provide an over-
view of information consumption patterns related to conspir-
acy content on four mainstream social media platforms
Introduction
(Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit), with a focus on
The advent of social media had a profound impact on
niche ones. Opinion polarisation and echo chambers appear
how people access information and interact online.
as pivotal elements of communication around conspiracy
Users tend to acquire information they like, filter out
theories. A relevant role may also be played by the content
information they do not, and join groups of like-minded
moderation policies enforced by each social media platform.
peers around a shared narrative called echo chambers
Banning contents or users from a social media could lead to a
[1e3]. According to group polarisation theory, an echo
level of user segregation that goes beyond echo chambers
chamber can act as a mechanism to reinforce existing
and reaches the entire social media space, up to the forma-
opinions moving the entire group toward more extreme
tion of ‘echo platforms’. The insurgence of echo platforms is a
positions. In many instances, conspiracy theories are the
new online phenomenon that needs to be investigated as it
pivot around which echo chambers develop and grow
could foster many dangerous phenomena that we observe
[4,3,5]. Considering that the spreading of conspiracy
online, including the spreading of conspiracy theories.
theories can have potentially harmful consequences for
Addresses individuals and societies [6,7], understanding the pro-
1
Sapienza University of Rome — Department of Computer Science liferation of such theories in online environments,
Viale Regina Elena, 295, 00100 Rome, Italy especially in the context of an infodemic [8,9], becomes
2
University of Florence, — Department of Mathematics and Computer
of fundamental importance.
Science, Viale Giovanni Battista Morgagni, 67/a, 50134 Florence, Italy
3
Enrico Fermi Research Center, Piazza del Viminale 1, Rome 00184,
Italy A relevant aspect concerning the spreading of conspiracy
4
Ca’ Foscari, University of Venice — Department of Environmental theories online is empirical evidence for the fact that
Sciences, Informatics and Statistics, Via Torino 155, 30172 Mestre Italy individuals endorsing conspiracy content (e.g. on Face-
Corresponding author: Quattrociocchi, Walter (walterquattrociocchi@
book) were highly engaged and more responsive to
gmail.com) endorse deliberately false or other questionable infor-
mation [1]. Indeed, in the context of internet and social
media, conspiracy theories seems to be strongly related
to misinformation, with which they share many aspects
Current Opinion in Psychology 2022, 47:101407
ranging from the presence of questionable elements in
This review comes from a themed issue on Conspiracy Theories their narrative to the reasons why they appeal to po-
(2023)
tential believers [10]. Also, the way in which conspiracy
Edited by Jan-Willem van Prooijen and Roland Imhoff theories propagate in online communities seem to pre-
For complete overview about the section, refer Conspiracy Theories sent structural features that are remarkably similar [11]
(2023) to those of (mis)information cascades happening on
Available online 30 June 2022 Facebook [2] and Twitter [12]. However, results
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2022.101407 concerning structural differences in information cas-
2352-250X/© 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
cades should be taken with caution [13] given the
intrinsic limitation of a false/true or science/conspiracy
dichotomy and the inherent unbalance of these cate-
Keywords
gorised datasets [14].

www.sciencedirect.com Current Opinion in Psychology 2022, 47:101407

2 Conspiracy Theories (2023)
Like misinformation, conspiracy theories appear on
most social media platforms, from mainstream to niche
ones, involving all kind of users, from genuine believers
to debunkers and simple observers [15]. While non-
conspiracy information by news outlets outpaces
conspiracy-related content, the relevance of the users’
engagement around conspiracy is not negligible [2,12].
Echo chambers and conspiracy in social
media
In the following we provide an overview of the typical
information consumption patterns on Facebook, Twitter,
YouTube, and Reddit in relationship to conspiracy con-
tent. In the last section, we briefly discuss results about
niche social media platforms.
Facebook
In the past years Facebook has been accused of being a
vehicle for conspiracy theories and misinformation
spreading arguably more than other social media plat-
forms, facing criticism on a number of themes including
vaccine hesitancy,1 the Russian interference in the 2016
U.S. elections,2 climate change denial,3 the so-called
‘infowars’ case,4 and more recently the role played in
fomenting the 2021 U.S. Capitol Hill attack5 and in the
debate around COVID-19.6 Despite that, quantitative
investigation on misinformation/conspiracy consump-
tion on Facebook has been somewhat limited - e.g.
compared to Twitter - possibly due to increasing re-
strictions in data accessibility following the Cambridge
Analytica case in 2018, when a private firm used Face-
book users’ data without consent to profile individuals
and send them personalised political advertisements..7
However, the presence of strong polarisation and
echoechambers on Facebook, arguably facilitated by the
News Feed (now just Feed) algorithm [16], is well-
documented and it is likely to be the among primary
drivers in the information diffusion dynamics on the
platform [1,4,17,3,18]. The characterisation of conspir-
acy news consumption and spreading has often been
based on a comparison with that of scientific content.
Within this framework, the existence of conspiracy
theory related community structures with echo-
chamber-like behavior has been reported and it was
shown that polarised consumers of conspiracy content
are highly focused on posts pertaining only to their own
1
www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/nov/13/majority-antivaxx-vaccine-ads-
facebook-funded-by-two-organizations-study.
2
www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/apr/12/facebook-fake-engagement-
whistleblower-sophie-zhang.
3
www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-denial-spreads-on-facebook-as-
scientists-face-restrictions/.
4
www.vox.com/2018/7/16/17577426/media-left-right-facebook-define-journalism.
5
www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/10/22/jan-6-capitol-riot-facebook/.
6
www.thetimes.co.uk/article/facebook-page-for-covid-conspiracy-theorists-has-
hundreds-of-thousands-of-followers-7c285b05f.
7 8
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/cambridge-analytica-facebook-
influence-us-election.
Current Opinion in Psychology 2022, 47:101407
community and very active in diffusing such contents
[1,17,19]. These users tend to be little to not affected
by exposure to debunking posts, and their community
shows a dominant negative attitude in response to them
[20], suggesting the inefficacy of the debunking
approach within echo chambers. Importantly, the
(automatic) identification of conspiracy theories on
Facebook proves difficult. In the study by Conti et al.
[13] the authors devised a classifier relying on the
structural features of the content propagation cascades
to find that conspiracy and science content reverberates
in a way which is hard to distinguish from one another.
Recently, Facebook has intensified its efforts against the
proliferation of conspiracy theories and misinformation8
through enhancing content moderation activities on the
platform (see e.g. the case of Qanon9). The effective-
ness of those actions, however, is currently still
debated [21,22].
Twitter
In the last decade, Twitter has been widely used as a
workbench for studying social phenomena including the
spreading of conspiracy theories and misinformation.
Some example includes Brexit [23], the Catalan refer-
endum [24], the US presidential elections [25,26], and
the COVID-19 vaccines debate [27]. One of the Twitter
peculiarities is the presence of automated accounts
often used to amplify the diffusion of controversial
content about different topics [25,26], including con-
spiracy theories. The role of automation [28] and, more
in general, coordination [29], combined with the
recommendation algorithm and biases in user choices
fostered the emergence of polarisation and echo cham-
bers on the platform. Echo chambers has been detected
around strongly debated topics such as abortion, gun
control and climate change [3]. Moreover, some com-
munities tend to be consistent across topics: for
example, climate change deniers are usually closer to
conservative political position, while activists tends to
sympathise for liberals.
Twitter actively engaged in combating the spreading of
problematic content by enforcing several strategies,
from prohibiting political advertisement, to moderation
and accounts ban. The results of these actions seem to
impact the amount of misinformation and conspiracy
theories circulating, such as in the case of the 2019
European elections [30] or 2020 US presidential elec-
tions [31]. Yet, conspiracy theories may still be popular
among some groups of users [32].
YouTube
Research involving the role of conspiracy theories (and
misinformation) on YouTube is quite recent. A
https://about.fb.com/news/tag/misinformation/.
9
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-54443878.
www.sciencedirect.com

motivation for this new line of research involving
YouTube data is perhaps due to the media coverage
received by the platform for what concerns its role in
exacerbating users’ opinions by means of its video
recommendation algorithm10. According to some studies
[33,34], the algorithm seems to be responsible for the
creation of the filter bubble and eventually of rabbit
holes, that is, loops of questionable and conspiracy
contents suggested by the algorithm, creating a vicious
circle of problematic recommendations.
Despite a continuous effort to moderate inappropriate
and problematic videos and comments, YouTube, just
like other platforms, hosts a number of conspiracy
related contents. Furthermore, a recent research
involving three different conspiracy theories has shown
that videos related to conspiracy display a higher
popularity in terms of number of views, than videos
aiming at debunking them [35]. This result is in line
with previous studies on the platform [36] according to
which conspiracy users tend to interact more with like-
minded peers. Evidence for the presence of echo
chambers was also found during COVID-19 debate [37],
after categorising channels along two dimensions
corresponding to their reliability and political bias. As
expected, a wide share of low-reliability and high-bias
channels were also responsible for sharing conspiracy
videos. Nevertheless, evidence about echo chambers in
partisan discussion is still debated [38,39].
Reddit
Given its growing popularity, Reddit has recently
captured the attention of researchers. Reddit posts are
gathered within communities of interest called
‘subreddits’, covering specific topics and actively
moderated by their members. On this social media, the
recommendation algorithm apparently does not nourish
the echo chamber effect [3,40], with people interacting
with news from a relatively wide set of sources. The lack
of polarisation shown by Reddit users found support in
the study of misinformation and opinion dynamics [40].
Despite Reddit’s low users’ polarisation, researchers put
a remarkable effort into investigating how conspiracy
theories evolve on the platform and how certain users
may still radicalise around specific narratives. Analyses
of the linguistic dimension [41] was employed to show
that similar narrative motifs are shared among different,
even unrelated, conspiracy theories, or to identify early
warnings of users departure from conspiratorial com-
munities [42]. Data from Reddit have been used also to
investigate the social dynamics associated to joining
conspiratorial communities [43], highlighting margin-
alisation from other communities as the main driver for
such a phenomenon. Eventually in the study by Zhang
et al. [11], researchers found structural differences in
10
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/opinion/sunday/youtube-politics-radical.
html.
www.sciencedirect.com
Conspiracy theories and social media platforms Cinelli et al. 3
discussion cascades between conspiracy and science
related subreddits.
Other social media platforms
Less popular social media platforms are active matter of
investigation, as they are often populated by users hit by
moderation policies (e.g. bans) on mainstream plat-
forms. Gab [44,18], Voat [45] and Parler [46] are among
the most studied alternative platforms ensuring ‘free-
speech’ to their users, in which conspiracy theories and
related discussion proliferate [44,47,46,18]. Together
with social media platforms even messaging platforms
such as Telegram [48] are getting researchers’ attention
for their user base. Interestingly, before and during the
Capitol Hill riot, Gab and Parler registered a higher
average activity, with a contextual increase in the usage
of anti-social language [49].
Regulation and the risk of echo platforms
Social media platforms present rather different features
with respect to diffusion and hosting of conspiracy
theories that may be associated with differences in the
implemented feed algorithm and enforced modera-
tion policies.
A primary problem is that banning problematic users
from one platform may induce their migration to other
ones where no moderation is enforced; this was the case
of Infowars, a far-right conspiracy website whose owner
was banned by Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, but
gained large support (more than 200 k followers) on
Gab. One side, his ban reduced the overall number of
users exposed either accidentally or algorithmically to
borderline content, on the other the event may have
contributed to exacerbate the radicalisation of his orig-
inal audience and induced a migration in an even-more
polarised environment.
In this regard, it was observed how the presence of
regulation policies plays an important role in shaping
people exposure to questionable content [18]. Indeed,
by comparing a regulated and an unregulated social
media, namely Twitter and Gab, it was demonstrated
how the presence of moderation pursued by Twitter
significantly reduced questionable content, with a
consequent affiliation towards reliable sources in terms
of engagement and comments. Conversely, the lack of
precise regulation on Gab resulted in the tendency of
users to engage with both types of content, showing a
preference for the questionable one.
As we described in Section 2.5, the cases of Gab, Parler,
and Voat could not be singletons, since similar situations
could be re-created on new social media as, for instance,
The Truth created by Donald Trump. More generally,
content moderation may have unexpected effect at a
global level. As observed by Buntain et al. [34] the effect
of YouTube algorithmic moderation (i.e., reducing the
Current Opinion in Psychology 2022, 47:101407
4 Conspiracy Theories (2023)
visibility of certain videos) of conspiracy contents was
effective on the platform but, at the same time, it
inflated the spread of the same videos (shared as
YouTube links) on other social media platforms such as
Twitter and Reddit. Similarly, the act of banning users
and whole communities of conspiracy content on Reddit
positively correlated with migrations of users on Voat
that was hosting akin groups [45].
The new platforms reached by migrating users possess
the features of ‘echo platforms’ that can be defined as a
social media platform colonised by users belonging to a
specific echo chamber. This new online phenomenon
calls for further investigations, as it could potentially add
a multiplicative factor to many potentially problematic
phenomena that we observe online, including the
spreading of conspiracy theories.
Conclusions and future works
In this article, we reviewed several contributions related
to the circulation and communication of conspiracy the-
ories on a comprehensive set of social media platforms,
from mainstream to niche ones. Overall, polarisation and
echo chambers seem to be two main aspects that char-
acterise social dynamics around conspiracy theories.
These two phenomena may be somewhat reinforced by
the role of recommendation algorithms and moderation
policies differing from platform to platform.
In particular, the effects of the platforms’ moderation
policies that is banning or penalising controversial con-
tent’s visibility remain unclear. If, on the one hand,
moderation may reduce the visibility and spread of
conspiracy theories and misinformation, on the other
hand, it may trigger users’ migration toward less regu-
lated platforms. This phenomenon can shift the struc-
ture of the online environment from echo chambers to
echo platforms, where users may join different social
media based on their narrative instead of segregating
into communities with opposite opinions, definitely
reducing their exposure to a diverse set of contents.
Several aspects of conspiracy theories remain not clear.
First, little is known about the dynamics of the con-
spiracy theory’s popularity, especially at the early stage.
Why one theory becomes popular online is not yet well
understood, and it is crucial to implement counter-
measures to mitigate their spreading. Second, the ad-
vantages and disadvantages of actions such as the user or
content banning and the dismantling of communities
debating around conspiracy theories. Future works
should focus and clarify both aspects.
Conflict of interest statement
Nothing declared.
Acknowledgements
Current Opinion in Psychology 2022, 47:101407
We acknowledge the 100683EPID Project “Global Health Security Aca-
demic Research Coalition” SCH-00001-3391. Special thanks to Nicola
Vicidomini, Antonio Cartonio, Salvatore Aranzulla, Hypno Toad, Nino
Frassica, and Valerio Lundini for precious discussions and insights.
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