CTIDE
The Rising Tide of Conspiracy Theories in a Social Media Environment
A research project on how conspiracy theories move through social media and what happens to the people who encounter them. The same claim can arrive as a post on a feed, a forwarded image, or a voice note in a group chat, and we test whether that difference changes what people believe and what they pass on.
TÜBİTAK 2501 International Cooperation Program · Project No: 124N006
Three Studies, One Question
CTIDE rests on three studies that answer different parts of a broader question: “Does the same conspiracy theory become more convincing depending on the form it takes and the platform it travels through?”
Outputs
What We Study
CTIDE examines how the format of conspiratorial content and the platform it appears on shape what people believe, how long they keep watching, and what they pass on. Working across a national survey and two experiments in Türkiye, the project moves the question from who believes conspiracy theories to how digital content makes them persuasive.
Research and Objectives
CTIDE sets out to explain why conspiracy theories take hold in digital environments, and it does so in three steps.
A nationally representative survey establishes how widespread conspiracy beliefs are in Türkiye and which psychological, political, and environmental factors predict them. Two experiments then isolate what survey data cannot.
Holding the conspiratorial claim constant while varying its format and the platform context in which it appears, so that the effect of the medium can be separated from the characteristics of the people exposed to it.
Across both, the project traces what follows exposure, from belief endorsement to continued consumption, sharing, and political participation, with all materials and analysis code shared openly.
See each study for its design.
Our Team
Assistants
Funding
CTIDE is funded by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Türkiye (TÜBİTAK) under the 2501 International Cooperation Program (Project No: 124N006) and is conducted at Yeditepe University in collaboration with the University of Delaware.
How widespread are conspiracy beliefs in Türkiye, and who holds them?
Most of what we know about conspiracy beliefs in Türkiye comes from online convenience samples, which overrepresent younger and more digitally engaged respondents. CTIDE begins instead with a face-to-face survey of a nationally representative sample of 1,008 respondents, fielded in February 2025 and drawn using TÜİK NUTS-2 regional stratification.
The questionnaire covers endorsement of specific conspiracy theories circulating in the country, generalized conspiracy mentality, trust in political and media institutions, social media use across platforms, political orientation, and forms of political participation.
It also goes beyond prevalence to ask what predicts belief: demographic factors such as age, education, income, and gender, alongside national attitudes such as nationalism and national narcissism, and general modes of thinking such as distrust of others' intentions.
Example Items, in Three Categories
The real cure for cancer is being kept from people by pharmaceutical companies. Some world leaders are people controlled by hidden powers. The world is run by five families.
Foreign powers secretly manipulate Türkiye's food supply in order to control public health and the economy. The mysterious excavation at Tarsus is hiding something that is being kept from the public. Foreign companies deliberately lower the quality of food products in Türkiye in order to harm public health and shorten the lives of Turkish citizens.
Wi-Fi signals are secretly used to interact with the water in our bodies in order to control human thoughts and emotions. Technology giants use people's online data to create digital clones that look like them. Smart devices secretly alter sleep cycles in order to increase dependence on technology.
Does the same conspiracy claim work differently depending on which platform it appears on and what form it takes?
Platforms differ in the formats they favor, in how visible user interactions are, and in the feedback they give. People may respond to the same conspiratorial claim differently depending on where they meet it. Survey data cannot separate these features from each other, or from the people who happen to see them.
The experiment puts this to the test. In November 2025 we showed the same conspiratorial post to 1,326 people recruited through Meta Ads. Some saw it on Facebook, some on Instagram, some on Twitter/X. Some saw it written out, some saw it as a video. A control group saw no conspiratorial content at all. Every version reproduced the real interface of its platform, down to the profile, the engagement buttons, and the sharing counts.
Two conspiracy theories were used, both drawn from claims already circulating in Turkish online discussion:
- The first holds that genetically modified food is being used to alter the population. It is a local version of the Great Replacement narrative.
- The second concerns the 2007 plane crash that killed Turkish scientists working on thorium-based energy. The claim is that foreign powers brought the plane down to hold back the country's scientific progress.
Every participant saw both. The claim itself stayed the same across conditions. Only its format and its platform changed. We measure belief in the claim and willingness to engage with it, meaning sharing, liking, and commenting. The design, hypotheses, and analysis plan were preregistered on OSF.
How does conspiratorial content travel when it arrives through interpersonal channels rather than public feeds?
Not all conspiracy content passes through a public feed. A great deal of it moves quietly between people, forwarded from one chat to the next. These messages are hard to study. They leave no public trace, and researchers cannot see what circulates inside a closed app.
While the first experiment tested public posts, the second experiment of this project recreates the private setting where conspiracy theories circulate.
The experiment ran at the Behavioral Sciences Laboratory at Yeditepe University face to face in April 2026, with 265 participants. Each participant began with a short survey covering social media use, prior beliefs, and a set of personality measures. They then moved into a WhatsApp conversation and were asked to answer as they would in a chat with a friend.
Hiç düşündünüz mü, neden Türkiye'de bilime ve enerjiye yön veren değerli bilim insanlarımız şüpheli kazalarda hayatını kaybediyor? Bu mesele yalnızca bilim çevrelerini değil, hepimizi yakından ilgilendiriyor. Yıllar önce Isparta'da düşen uçakta hayatını kaybeden Prof. Engin Arık, Türkiye'nin enerji bağımsızlığı için büyük bir potansiyel olan toryum zenginliğini savunuyordu. O kazayla birlikte ülkemizin geleceği için çalışan bir ekip ortadan kaldırıldı. Raporlarda uçağın rotasından saptığı ve acil sinyallerin kesildiği iddiaları yer aldı. Böyle bir kaybın yalnızca bir kaza olarak açıklanması kamuoyunda ciddi soru işaretleri doğuruyor. Bu gerçekten tesadüf mü, yoksa bilim insanlarımıza ve Türkiye'nin ilerlemesine yönelik bir engellemenin parçası mı? Böyle bir ihtimal, ülkemizin stratejik projeleri açısından ciddi soru işaretleri doğurmuyor mu? Gerçekleri sorgulamak gerekmez mi? 🤔
18:42
1:12Messages came in three formats (written text, voice message, and video) and in two versions, one naming Türkiye as the target of the events described and one leaving the target unnamed.
Two popular conspiracy theories were used:
- one tying an earthquake to HAARP, a United States atmospheric research facility in Alaska, widely claimed online, without evidence, to be a weather and earthquake weapon
- the other concerning a 2007 plane crash that killed Turkish scientists working on thorium-based energy
After each message, participants rated how true the claim seemed and whether they would forward it to someone else. They were also asked who they held responsible for the events described, choosing among foreign actors, international companies, government officials, domestic economic interests, and chance. Alongside these scales, they typed their own replies to each message.
Once inside the simulated chat, participants treated it as a real exchange: they replied to each message the way they would to a friend, and the conversation unfolded much like an ordinary WhatsApp thread rather than a survey.
The study therefore captures two things at once. It tests whether format still matters when the content arrives privately, and it shows what people write back once it does.
What the Studies Show
National Survey
Economic, food, and foreign-interference conspiracies draw the strongest belief.
Global and national conspiracy theories draw similar belief; fictional ones draw less.
Demographics do not predict conspiracy belief; attitudes and thinking style do.
Nationalism predicts national conspiracies; distrust of the West predicts global ones.
Sharing a conspiratorial post depends on doomscrolling, not on believing it.
Belief turns into sharing only among people who doomscroll heavily.
Platform and Format Study
The same claim becomes more convincing when it is presented as a video.
Convincing claims are also the ones that travel furthest.
Facebook and Instagram made the same claim more believable than X.
WhatsApp Study
On WhatsApp, written messages are the most convincing format.
Papers, Briefs, and Public Material
Articles
Conference Presentations
Info Pages (Bilgilendirme Sayfaları)
Seven information notes summarizing the project's findings for the public are listed below (in Turkish).
- Project Aims and Scope
- How Widespread Is Belief in Conspiracy Theories in Türkiye?
- Who Believes Conspiracy Theories More?
- The Difference Between Presenting a Social Media Post as Text or Video
- The Difference Between Presenting a Post on Different Platforms
- The Effect of Sustained Exposure to Negative Content on Social Media
- Why Is WhatsApp a Different Environment?
Podcast and Video
Workshop
Upcoming
Workshop. Conspiracy Theories in the Digital Age (4 December 2026, hybrid). Yeditepe University, Istanbul.
The workshop brings together academics from various institutions to examine conspiracy theory beliefs in the evolving digital environment, from the political predictors and psychological and social roots of belief to its consequences for political behavior and the specific mechanisms by which digital platforms enable the distribution and evolution of conspiracy narratives. Contributions on related aspects of conspiracy beliefs beyond the digital sphere are also welcome.
With researchers from different countries taking part, we hope to create a space for a comparative discussion of how beliefs in conspiracy theories emerge and operate across different social and political contexts.
Presentations from the workshop will form the basis of an edited volume. Partial funding for travel costs to the host institution will be available.
Please express your interest by 16 October.
Contact Cengiz Erişen
cengiz.erisen@yeditepe.edu.tr