Anatomy of a ‘conspiracy loop’: Do we need a new way of looking at the spread of fake claims?

In US politics, conspiracies are rife – and many more emerged in the wake of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. Tackling them requires us to see conspiracism differently, says researcher Sophia Knight.

Within minutes of Saturday’s attempted assassination on former US President Donald Trump, conspiracy theories started to swirl online. Without any evidence, people spread claims that the incident was everything from a hoax to a plot. Swept up in a divisive presidential campaign, online voices spun up explanations to fill in the details of the day’s shocking events. 

Conspiracy theories are not new in American politics. Adherents of QAnon – a wide-ranging political conspiracy movement – were among those who caused chaos at the Capitol on 6 January 2021, while there are many still invested in conspiracy theories regarding the assassination of former President John F Kennedy more than 60 years ago. From such experiences, we know the division, discord and disintegration of trust they breed can be extremely damaging to a democracy’s health.

So, what do we do about this rising tide of conspiracism? Most importantly, the answer is not to just try and prove people wrong. Any attempt to debunk a conspiracy has a good chance of backfiring, playing into established narratives of “the elite” or “deep state” censoring the truth. 

In a recent report published by the UK think tank Demos and Everything is Connected – a research project at the University of Manchester – my co-authors and I argue that the first step is to change how we understand conspiracism. Conspiracy theories are not just bizarre curiosities festering on the fringes of society that are perpetuated by a handful of tinfoil-hat crazies. Nor do they emerge from thin air.

Rather, they are the result of a vicious cycle in which conspiratorial narratives emerge, are amplified and become fuel for ugly political fights. We call this dynamic the “conspiracy loop”. Tackling conspiracism requires breaking the loop.

Many proposed interventions for changing people’s belief in conspiracy theories have been found to be ineffective. Conspiracies are often talked about as “spiralling out of control”. But spirals are chaotic, runaway systems that quickly become unmanageable. The idea of a conspiracy loop offers a self-contained system on which we might have some hope of intervention.

In our report, we describe conspiracy loops as building and feeding back into themselves and they usually start with a “kernel of truth” from which most conspiracy theories evolve. In some cases this kernel is a literal “truth” – genuine conspiracies or secret plans by individuals or groups to do something harmful. In other cases, the “truth” refers to an environment of confusion, distrust, deficit and suspicion in which conspiracy theories flourish. The chaos and questions following the Trump assassination attempt offers an example of how these conditions can lead to speculation and disinformation quickly spreading.