Conspiracy theories about the ‘real’ origins of coronavirus have co-evolved with media coverage COVID-19 crisis itself; World Health Organization now warns a global “infodemic” paralleling viral pandemic. Covering these conspiracy presents difficult editorial choices for news organizations. This article examines how diverse outlets chose to report on one key theory: (entirely unfounded) claim t...

Fluid Milk Market " People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public or in some convenience to raise prices…. "

BACKGROUND The sound-induced flash illusion is an auditory-visual illusion--when a single flash is presented along with two or more beeps, observers report seeing two or more flashes. Previous research has shown that the illusion gradually disappears as the temporal delay between auditory and visual stimuli increases, suggesting that the illusion is consistent with existing temporal rules of ne...

We propose a novel approach framed in terms of information theory and entropy to tackle the issue of the propagation of conspiracy theories. We represent the initial report of an event (such as the 9/11 terroristic attack) as a series of strings of information, each string classified by a two-state variable Ei = ±1, i = 1, ..., N. If the values of the Ei are set to −1 for all strings, a state o...

The psychology of conspiracy theory beliefs is not yet well understood, although research indicates that there are stable individual differences in conspiracist ideation - individuals' general tendency to engage with conspiracy theories. Researchers have created several short self-report measures of conspiracist ideation. These measures largely consist of items referring to an assortment of pro...