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What Makes People Join Conspiracy Communities?: Role of Social Factors in Conspiracy Engagement
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

What Makes People Join Conspiracy Communities?: Role of Social Factors in Conspiracy Engagement

Shruti Phadke, Mattia Samory and Tanushree Mitra
Proceedings of the ACM on human-computer interaction, v 4(CSCW3), pp 1-30
05 Jan 2021
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3432922
url
https://doi.org/10.1145/3432922View
Published, Version of Record (VoR) Restricted

Abstract

Collaborative and social computing Collaborative and social computing theory, concepts and paradigms Empirical studies in collaborative and social computing Human-centered computing Social media
Widespread conspiracy theories, like those motivating anti-vaccination attitudes or climate change denial, propel collective action, and bear society-wide consequences. Yet, empirical research has largely studied conspiracy theory adoption as an individual pursuit, rather than as a socially mediated process. What makes users join communities endorsing and spreading conspiracy theories? We leverage longitudinal data from 56 conspiracy communities on Reddit to compare individual and social factors determining which users join the communities. Using a quasi-experimental approach, we first identify 30K future conspiracists?(FC) and30K matched non-conspiracists?(NC). We then provide empirical evidence of the importance of social factors across six dimensions relative to the individual factors by analyzing 6 million Reddit comments and posts. Specifically, in social factors, we find that dyadic interactions with members of the conspiracy communities and marginalization outside of the conspiracy communities are the most important social precursors to conspiracy joining-even outperforming individual factor baselines. Our results offer quantitative backing to understand social processes and echo chamber effects in conspiratorial engagement, with important implications for democratic institutions and online communities.

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46 citations in Scopus

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