Exposure or Predisposition?Tracking the Development of Conspiracy Beliefs Online

• In Event: Media, Social Media and Conspiracy Theories

Abstract

The uncertainty and disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has created a breeding ground for conspiracy beliefs, which pose a serious threat to public health and social cohesion. These beliefs about COVID-19 have negatively influenced health-related behaviors, such as vaccination and mask-wearing (Allington et al., 2020), and have been linked to increased intent to engage in violent behavior and decreased political trust and political participation (Jolley et al., 2020). It is thus essential to understand the factors that contribute to the spread of conspiracy beliefs and to develop interventions to combat them.
We theorize conspiracy beliefs as a “marriage of information and predispositions” (Zaller, 1992, p. 6; emphasis added) that drive individuals to attribute significant social and political events to secret plots by powerful and malevolent actors (Douglas et al., 2019). In order to disentangle the effect and interaction of predisposition and (selective) exposure to conspiracy theory, we take advantage of a unique opportunity: a panel survey launched right at the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak in March 2020 that used webtracking to collect the panelists’ media diet for the next three months, followed by a second survey in May 2020. Panelists were recruited through quota sampling in Switzerland (N=574) and Germany (N=573).
We measure three types of predispositions in the first survey wave: populism (Schultz et al., 2018), nativism (Akkerman et al., 2017), and political mistrust. We then used automated content analysis of tracked media documents to detect exposure to conspiracy information. Specifically, we trained a BERT classifier to detect the presence of conspiracy information on the sentence level of media documents (F1 score = 0.93 compared to manually coded gold standard of 10000 sentences). Based on existing lists (De León et al., 2023), we coded the source of a tracked document as being part mainstream media (including tabloid and quality media) or alternative media (social media and hyperpartisan alternative media [HAC]). In the second survey wave, we asked respondents about their beliefs in 8 COVID-related conspiracy theories about either their own government or a foreign power as conspirator.
We find high and cross-cutting exposure to conspiracy information in individuals’ media diets, despite relatively few visits to HAC media sites in general. On average, 7.2% of tracked documents contained at least one sentence with conspiracy information. We find that high political mistrust is associated with higher exposure to conspiracy content in HAC media and social media, as well as higher willingness to believe in conspiracy theories. Exposure to those two sources, in turn, further increased belief in a conspiracy by one’s own government. Conversely, exposure to quality media negatively predicted conspiracy beliefs. Finally, in a mediation model we find that nativism and populism decrease the chance of being exposed to conspiracy theories covered in mainstream media, where such exposure would have decreased their belief in conspiracy perpetrated by foreign actors. The findings have far-reaching implications for health communication in times of crisis, which will be discussed in detail at the conference.

References
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Allington, D., Duffy, B., Wessely, S., Dhavan, N., & Rubin, J. (2020). Health-protective behaviour, social media usage and conspiracy belief during the Covid-19 public health emergency. Psychological Medicine, 1-7.
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Authors

• Silke Christine Adam, University of Bern

• Tobias Rohrbach

• Mykola Makhortykh, University of Bern

• Franziska Barbara Keller, University of Bern

• Ani Baghumyan, University of Bern

• Chiara Valli, University of Bern

• Ernesto de León, University of Bern

• Maryna Sydorova