2020-11-05T09:50:18+01:00

In article from the Financial Time on how Big Tech can “best tackle conspiracy theories,” the author shares some interesting insights from research done by a group of ethnographers called Ethnographic Praxis in Context. Apparently these researchers observed that people who believe in conspiracy theories tend to “believe information that comes from scruffier, amateurish sites, since these seem more ‘authentic’”:

Anyone hoping to debunk these ideas also needs to think hard about cultural signals. Take website design. Twenty-first century professionals typically give more credibility to information that comes from sites that look polished.

Conversely, the ethnographers discovered that conspiracy theorists are more likely to believe information that comes from scruffier, amateurish sites, since these seem more “authentic”. This point may not be obvious to techies at places such as Google — and is not the type of insight that big data analysis will reveal. But it is crucial.

Read the full article here.