Stupid? Deluded? Uneducated? Why ordinary people get hooked on conspiracy theories

In May 2020, as governments around the world began to respond with alarm to the developing COVID-19 pandemic, an illegal protest sprung up in Melbourne. On the steps of the Victorian Parliament House, security guard and unlikely protest leader Fanos Panayides stepped up to question COVID-19 lockdowns and restrictions.

Victoria Police rushed forward to arrest him just as he started linking vaccinations to the biblical “mark of the beast” – the number 666. For the small but vocal crowd, this seemed perfectly timed. To them, Panayides was revealing a satanic secret that “the powers that be” did not want known, and his arrest proved a government cover-up was directing police actions.

And so conspiratorial thinking was a feature of the burgeoning pandemic protest movement from the beginning. In those early days, the Melbourne-based movement was dominated by people who had never considered themselves political activists before. This was a very diverse group, consisting of a wide variety of religions, ages, ethnic backgrounds, and occupations.

Over the next three years, the conspiracy theories got wilder and wilder. At their height, a variety of different COVID conspiracists believed that Melbourne’s onerous lockdowns were called so that Chinese-made 5G technology could be secretly installed to monitor the vaccinated via injected spike proteins and microchips, while children were moved around via tunnels beneath Melbourne so that their bodily fluids could be harvested for the elites.

The tunnels reached as far as Uluru, some said. It was there aliens conducted experiments on the hapless “mole children”. Meanwhile, other conspiracists were boiling vinegar over fires in their backyards to dispel the “chemtrails” (aka vapour trails) being emitted from planes overhead. Some even burnt down 5G towers or disrupted vaccination centres.

This unusual mix of protesters and conspiracists had one thing in common: they were trying to make sense of an unprecedented and disruptive global event. Conspiracies not only gave them a framework for making meaning of frightening events, they also gave them a sense of agency – there was something they could do. They could fight back against the secret forces. Some started turning up every day outside state governors’ residences and yelling about a supposed government cover-up of the names of paedophiles in power – they wanted to save the children, they said. And, more than four years later, some are still “saving the children” in this same way.

What led to this situation? Why are so many people attracted to these outlier beliefs? And what impact does this have on society and societal trust?

It is too simplistic to dismiss individual conspiracy theorists as stupid, deluded or uneducated. They are most commonly caring and worried people wanting to understand and improve society, and who can end up holding wild and clearly nonsensical conspiratorial beliefs.

It helps to think about your own beliefs. Many people have grown up with stories about “the tooth fairy”, Father Christmas, angels or ghosts, and may even still believe in those things. Are these conspiracies? Some people are convinced the 1969 moon landing never happened, or that the terrorist attack on September 11 was a false-flag or inside job. The evidence proves otherwise, but people cling to their beliefs, and so they become conspiracists. No amount of scientific data can pull them out of their belief that a band of nefarious plotters are behind a cover-up. Researchers accept that fake information will be readily accepted as truth if it conforms to an already held set of beliefs, and that factual information will be rejected for implausible scenarios which confirm a set of beliefs.

Interestingly, sometimes conspiracies are later proven to be true, and these cases can provide justification for the conspiracy adherents. The process of questioning official narratives by conspiracy theorists can yield further facts that may have been occluded in the first official accounts of an event. Wild conspiracies began to circulate as soon as the September 11 attacks began. Over two decades later, some of these – particularly the antisemitic ones – have become bedrock beliefs for many conspiracy theorists. Yet, some researchers argue, the pressure from conspiracy theorists forced authorities into releasing more detailed information about the attacks.

A key problem is that it takes time after a big event for accurate information to be obtained and released, and this allows a significant gap to develop between what is known and what happened.

Investigative journalists and researchers operate in this gap. And conspiracies flourish in this gap. Most people abandon the conspiracy once a certain level of facts provides a plausible explanation. Conspiracy theorists, however, are on an endless quest and won’t stop pushing until their belief is confirmed.

Among researchers, the term “conspiracy theory” is notoriously hard to define. In general, however, the consensus is that it involves more than a set of wacky beliefs. A conspiracy theory necessarily involves a conspiracy – that is, a power plot secretly formulated by a hidden group of people which has nefarious or harmful aims. (This rules out the tooth fairy and Santa.) Perhaps the “mother” of all conspiracy theories is the centuries-old belief that Jewish people are all powerful, financial manipulators in a global cabal enacting evil plots. Claims during the pandemic about George Soros orchestrating the COVID-19 crisis for purposes of population control fit the definition of an antisemitic conspiracy.

So who decides what’s right, what’s wrong, what counts as a fact? Does truth even matter if providing more facts is ineffectual in dissuading conspiracy theorists of their false beliefs? I would argue that in this so-called “post truth” era of social media, alternative facts, AI and personal ideologies, truth and trust are even more crucial, especially if we are all “choosing our own realities”.

Determining the truth claims of a conspiracy can be very difficult if facts are incomplete or just currently unknowable. Perhaps the best way to evaluate a conspiracy theory is to follow accurate and credible information from subject experts. Except that in our current fake news misinformation/disinformation social media ecosystem, this is becoming increasingly difficult. Deepfakes and the widespread adoption of AI (for example, ChatGPT) are creating an extremely disturbing challenge.

And even people with demonstrably false beliefs are concerned with truth – they just rely on different sources to find it. During the pandemic, the phrase “do your own research” became the guiding principle for determining fact from fiction. Instead of relying on experts (“part of the global plot to enslave humanity anyway”), conspiracy theorists turned to each other. “Word of mouth” from my pal online replaced “peer reviewed” by a credentialled expert. As a result, bad actors – whether for the purposes of making money, influencing political processes through fake election claims or destabilising political systems – were able to weaponise the “do your own research” brigade. Rumours and word of mouth played a huge part.

Rumours can have serious and long-lasting effects. “Pizzagate” is a well-known example of how rumours, spread for political purposes (in this case, right-wing efforts to discredit Democrat candidates during the 2016 American election campaign) lead to violence. Supposedly, Democrats such as Hillary Clinton were abusing children in the basement of a pizza restaurant in Washington. As the rumour spread, staff at the restaurant began receiving death threats. Finally, a man tried to free the captive children by storming the restaurant with a gun. No children were found – there was no basement. Instead of the conspiracy dissipating, however, the idea of a global ring of elite paedophiles took hold in the nascent QAnon conspiracy movement and later became a mainstay of conspiracy theories during the COVID-19 pandemic. This conspiracy is now deeply embedded in right-wing attacks on sex education for children and protests against events such as drag queen story hour. The Institute of Strategic Dialogue noted in 2024 that transphobic and anti-drag rhetoric and conspiracy theories had activated a network of groups that had successfully disrupted many all-ages drag events in Australia.

Where rumours and conspiracy theories take hold, trust in mainstream institutions spirals down. The disruption of social cohesion is one noted outcome of the embrace of controversial conspiracy theories. At a personal level, adherents can lose their employment, social networks, even contact with their families. This has been well documented among adherents to the QAnon conspiracy. According to 2022 research by the Public Religion Research Institute, around one in five Americans believed in the QAnon tenets that a political storm was coming, that violence might be needed to save the country, and that the government, media and financial worlds were controlled by Satan-worshipping paedophiles. Family members of QAnon followers have documented the deep rifts caused by a commitment to these beliefs. Obviously, having a large number of people embracing violence is a danger for others and for democracy itself, as the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol showed. Australia is vulnerable to similar beliefs and consequences.

And what of the conspiracy theorists themselves? It seems many see themselves as heroes in their own Hollywood story. They are a plucky band of misfits and outsiders who gamely pursue the truth at risk of ridicule or worse, believing they will win in the end. This is a story we are culturally very familiar with. It’s also a seductive narrative that many people could fall for. After all, who doesn’t want to fight baddies and save children? Adherence to a conspiracy theory, or being in the “conspiracy world”, allows people to find a supportive tribe.

Post-pandemic, Australia’s anti-COVID restrictions movement has broken into various groups that meet for a meal, share homegrown produce, disrupt their local council meetings and yell at drag queens. On the surface, it looks like these have become civic-minded (albeit conservative) democratic groups. Scratch the surface, however, and the foundation of these groups is a collection of conspiracy theories: chemtrails, sovereign citizen understanding of the law, satanic paedophiles, global Jewish elites – a veritable smorgasbord of conspiracies.

The Centre for Countering Digital Hate found in 2021 that just 12 individuals and their organisations were responsible for up to 65 per cent of all anti-vaccine misinformation, rising to 73 per cent on Facebook alone. These individuals served to make a lot of money from their digital content, alternative health supplements and other products such as books. And their reach on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter (now X) and Instagram was over 59 million people. Social media companies’ efforts to de-platform the “Dirty Dozen” were woefully inadequate.

Because of the way algorithms work on social media, there is no “one” internet that we all see. Newsfeeds are vastly different and individualised. Interest groups and lobby groups are able to weaponise conspiracies and fake news easily. In early 2024, the EU Commission opened a case against Meta for illegally and irresponsibly allowing EU citizens to be exposed to paid Russian disinformation on its platforms. The erosion of trust in institutions, experts, media and governments is a goal for bad-faith actors. Blaming conspiracy theorists for being duped, therefore, seems unfair – the odds of always discerning facts and truth are stacked against all social media users.

There’s no doubt that conspiracy theories have a big impact on trust, but it’s worth asking what comes first: loss of trust or the rise of conspiracies? At their essence, conspiracies coalesce around a belief in an evil, political plot operating in secret for nefarious ends. Lack of trust is just one emotional element that fuels conspiracy thinking, alongside suspicion, anxiety, fear and righteous anger. There is no doubt that conspiracy theories are based on mistrust and that they spread mistrust further, somewhat like black mould. Conspiracy thinking becomes a template that can be applied in myriad situations: school curriculum, health care, climate change, cloud formations and so on.

Even in a democracy like Australia with multiple independent and authoritative, non-government sources of information, and a political system which is based on a certain level of transparency and accountability, conditions can arise for conspiracies to flourish. “Disinfecting with sunlight” or exposing conspiracy thinking to scrutiny and increasing the amount of accurate information available may not be enough to stem the flow of conspiracy theories, but it certainly helps.

Kaz Ross is a researcher into far-right extremism and conspiracy theories. This is an edited extract from Age of Doubt: Building Trust in a World of Misinformation (Monash University Publishing), published on March 1.

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