“Surprisingly, consumers of alternative news, which are the users trying to avoid the mainstream media ‘mass-manipulation’, are the most responsive to the injection of false claims,” they conclude.
Conspiracy theories seem to come about by a process in which ordinary satirical commentary or obviously false content somehow jumps the credulity barrier. And that seems happen through groups of people who deliberately expose themselves to alternative sources of news.
Of course, there may be other ways that conspiracy theories emerge. Some theories may well be truths that have been deliberately suppressed by higher powers such as governments corporations and so on. But this work reveals that there is also a plausible mechanism through which false stories become thought of as true.
The question now is how to exploit this new understanding to improve the flow and labeling of information, whatever its source.
See the full story here: http://www.technologyreview.com/view/525616/data-mining-reveals-how-conspiracy-theories-emerge-on-facebook/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20140319