PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — With social media platforms making false information easier to spread than ever, conspiracy theories are everywhere you look. Why do so many people believe them, despite access to provable facts to debunk them?
🎧 The theory behind conspiracy theories
Derek Arnold, who teaches a course on conspiracy theories at Villanova University, joined KYW Newsradio In Depth to explain how they get started and what attracts people to believe in them.
"I think the big call to it was the JFK assassination, in '63. So we're looking at over 50 years now — in fact, it'll be 60 years, this November. And so that is something that I think, because of when it happened and all the things that kind of came after that, it kind of was almost a cascade," Arnold said.
"I think of things where people were not trusting the government as much and issues like the Vietnam War, others assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., ... certainly Watergate coming down the line — this was just something that just kind of cascaded into, I think, bigger and bigger — almost like a validation that people were thinking that they couldn't trust the government, and that there are other major players and things that they just didn't know, but suspected, that ... it can only be people that were 'all powerful.'"
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