> It seems like you already bought into their propaganda for justifying surveillance but you don't like the result.

I think one can arrive at the opinion they would prefer not to have their recommendations flooded with stuff from from alt-right or conspiracy Youtube/Twitter/whatever without buying into propaganda.

I believe the demonization of the term "conspiracy theory" is propaganda. Aren't we in a thread discussing a theory that organizations that are not apple will eventually conspire with apple to utilize this invasive new technology? I find it so confusing that the idea that different factions may be working together in non-public ways is such an impossibility to so many people.

Sure, fine. But one would not arrive at using terms like that if they were not being exposed to and buying into the propaganda being put out there. The proof that they're affected by the propaganda is them using the jargon of it. Before that, no one was going around saying "God I hate it when I see conspiracy theories!" It wasn't something on anyone's radar.

I can see that, but that sense of the term (which is, I'm confident, the main one in use by a long shot) dates to, like, the aftermath of the JFK assassination and early Roswell-related groups, no? The term itself is older, but I mean the colloquial use of "ideas expressed by kooks and crackpots with excessively-complex and unlikely explanations for things, with an intense resistance to even clear evidence that they're wrong, and far too strong a prior that their unlikely idea is correct". IOW I think you lost that fight by the 70s, at the latest—it's been on people's "radar" since then.

Meanwhile, groups/people/movements that completely match that description are real and it's handy to have a term for that behavior, even if you think it's applied too broadly (and maybe it is). We've got the similarly-abused word "cult", but abuse aside it's still handy to have a way to refer to groups that actually do closely fit the colloquial, pejorative meaning of the term, and there's no way you're going to get people to stop using the word that way.