The content that they are exposed to on a daily basis is telling them that they are under attack and constantly uses war metaphors. The end result is that they are hyper-sensitive to conflict and see everything in terms of winning and losing. Conspiracies give them a comforting sense of belonging and being privy to a secret truth, providing them simple explanations for a chaotic and confusing world.

People love feeling special and part of a unique in-group, that might be simply it.

I think for many, it starts out as posting slurs and extreme ideas as jokes to troll the "normies", until they suddenly really mean it. I remember when Reddit's "The Donald" sub became bigger and hit the front page every day, most people thought it was satire. Until it was not.

It's a mix of both imo. Newcomers who don't realize it's satire/trolling and old timers who like the attention, grift opportunity or feeling of leading a movement.

They always mean it, they just start out only being comfortable with jokes and memes that are bigoted, and then as they get more validation, they get more comfortable and open about their bigotry.

Rings true. They wrap their ideas into "joke-y" memes to test the waters.

In a word, yes.

The CTs are not so 'clearly fabricated' to many people; CT adherents are often credulous people who self-select or are funneled into communities where they can find validation and reinforcement. Such communities may be engineered for or sustained by profit, fiscal or political.

In terms of aggression, many CTs are based on Manichean narratives of powerful evildoers suppressing hapless truth-seekers. Qanon in particular attracts people like this, as it posits a wicked conspiracy of elites that preys upon children. Offhand I can think of 4 murders where the alleged perpetrator was immersed in such beliefs. As Voltaire wrote, Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.'

At the more cynical end, some people may not believe CTs but see an opportunity to weaponize them or an excuse to engage in behavior as a member of a group that would be unsanctioned if they acted as an individual. There's some research indicating about 30% of people are motivated by seeing others worse off, even at cost to themselves.

the NSDAP rose to power and started world war 2 with just an conspiracy theory that "the jew" was trying to kill the arian race and the world was secretly controlled by them. The modern conspiracy theories are just variants of the old ones. The modern theories replace "the jew" just with unspecified groups, families which are jewish/are descedants of jews or make political enemies non human to legitimise attacks against them.

Conservative politicians and talking heads have driven into their audiences that the "mainstream media" cannot be trusted and "today's conspiracy theory is tomorrow's news".

I mean the mainstream has done more to promote conspiracy theories than any tabloid regurgitating individual. When you put top experts on TV denouncing things as conspiracy theories that turn out to be valid, you drive more reasonable individuals to wonder what else the tabloids were right about.

How often does that happen though, i.e. "top experts" saying something is a ct but it turns out to be real? I can't think of any examples.

Sure, pundits on 24h news are often wrong, but I wouldn't call them top experts, more like hot-take-deliverers. Believe them at your peril.

I'm sure it's rare, but when it does happen it makes waves. The chinese lab leak theory is the first thing that comes to mind, but also the CDC director going on TV to tell the nation if you got vaccinated you wouldn't catch covid, get sick, or spread covid is another that comes to mind.

Vaccination rates in children have plummeted, and I suspect if we thought anti-vax rhetoric was bad pre-covid, it's not going to hold a candle to the near future.

A big complication when judging things like this is that, like many relationships in political/social dynamics, there is strong asymmetry. Similar to the saying that a black American must be twice as good a citizen to be considered half as good a citizen (i.e. flaws/failures are counted more heavily against them), tons of people can espouse harmful/baseless theories all day, and they will receive criticism and support that doesn't really add up to anything unusual, but when one person who said "that's not true" turns out to be wrong, it "makes waves", as you say. This makes sense, since, on the theorists' side of things, they feel like the underdogs and the nay-sayers feel like the elites; and on the nay-sayer's side of things, they are typically being held to a higher standard by even their fellows. In other words, the optics/feelings don't really match up with pragmatic/generous observation.

Another problem, which I think is more overlooked, is that when people talk about the cases of the nay-sayers being wrong, it frequently goes like this:

- Theorist claims uncomfortable truth X.

- Nay-sayer says X is not true.

- X turns out to be true.

However, most of these cases are really closer to something like this:

- Theorist claims X, which, if untrue, is a harmful thing to spread.

- Nay-sayer says there is no (or not enough) evidence for X (which is way different from insisting that X is not true).

- X turns out to be potentially true, partially true, or true for a specific case (and sometimes unqualifiedly true!).

In reality, there are vanishingly few of the former case, and even for those cases that exist, the nay-sayer's case is still frequently the better case and could reasonably be held again if the same scenario happens again, where the theorist's truth is arguably a broken-clock scenario.

If the CDC director made a false statement about what a vaccine can achieve (i.e. milder or less symptoms), then that's a bad mistake, but it's not "a top expert claiming something is a CT but later it turns out it wasn't".

When you have people claiming the vaccine doesn't work and a public figure goes to the press to overstate that the vaccine not only works, but it is essentially, perfect, then it's not a bad mistake - it's a knee-jerk response to the "conspiracy" criticism without evidence.

Russian ultranationalist believe that Ukraine is fighting the war as a puppet of US that wishes to prop up its crumbling world domination.

Not answering your question, just a terrifying current example.

Are you aware that 8chan (not kun) is in possession of a vibrant latin community (6/20 top boards), a well attended board devoted to the discussion of videogames, and another to comics, amongst other things? Looking at it right now, the politics board ranks around 20th in popularity. They may be right wing, but they're not fixating on it all that much.

> 8kun, previously called 8chan, Infinitechan or Infinitychan (stylized as ∞chan), is an imageboard website composed of user-created message boards. An owner moderates each board, with minimal interaction from site administration.[1] The site has been linked to white supremacism, neo-Nazism, the alt-right, racism and antisemitism, hate crimes, and multiple mass shootings.[2][3][4] The site has been known to host child pornography;[5][6] as a result, it was filtered out from Google Search in 2015.[7] Several of the site's boards played an active role in the Gamergate controversy, encouraging Gamergate affiliates to frequent 8chan after 4chan banned the topic. 8chan is the home of the discredited far-right QAnon conspiracy theory.[8][9][10]

But they have a vibrant latin community so... it's all good?

I specifically said 8chan, not kun, they're different; there is currently an 8chan and an 8kun.

"I'm not racist, I have black friends!"

Yes kun, 8chan hasn't existed since 2019. 5/10 of the top boards are Qanon driven, and the main Qanon board has more traffic and users than the rest of the top 50 boards put together.

Nobody is going to 8kun to discuss vidya, the proof of this being that most of the thread images 404 since an image hosting server crashed last year and Ronanon hasn't sourced either a backup or a replacement. Weaksauce.

Incorrect, there is an 8chan right now, in addition to 8kun. It's at 8chan.se.

nobody cares dot jpg

They don't want to hear that imageboards aren't really any different than Reddit.

The only significant difference really is VC backing and being owned by someone socially acceptable.

Elon's doing a good job piercing that veil with Twitter though.

When hotwheels created 8chan it was already dogshit and a meetup place for racists who thought that /pol/ was not racist enough. Watkins' takeover has made it pretty much only QAnon conspiracy KKK type shit.

sage

Same reason people believe the clearly fabricated conspiracies made popular by CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, and most other “news” sources over the past several years - a polarized nation with institutions and authority figures that have found success in dividing people against each other to get them to support “their side” more unequivocally, leading to a persistent sense of underdog-ism and susceptibility to hero complexes.