Project Description:

The project has set out to track how conspiracies are weaponized and how they go viral. We are seeing increased radicalization connected to conspiracy theories in the United States and globally.  Since dangerous conspiracies across the political spectrum employ the Internet to disseminate their views and recruit members, this basic research project will scrape, analyze, and assess open-source materials from the surface net, semi encrypted platforms, and the dark web, in order to build a model of conspiracy radicalization, recruitment, and operational planning. We seek to understand the social ecology of misinformation.

This project has already resulted in a number of concrete deliverables, including:

• An academic press book, multiple op-eds and peer-reviewed publications, including scholarly articles dedicated to theory building and hypothesis testing
• Seminars, trainings, and presentations across academic disciplines and to military branches and government agencies
• Podcasts and Media Interviews for outreach and dissemination
• Training and professional development opportunities for students, using novel and advanced methodological approaches and in multiple languages

Principal Investigator: Mia Bloom, Georgia State University

Co-Principal Investigators: David Maimon, Georgia State University, Dr. Sophia Moskalenko, Georgia State University and Dr. Nelly Lahoud, New America

Years of Award: 2020-2024

In coordination with: https://ebcs.gsu.edu/project/conspiracy-theories/

Managing Service Agency: Office of Naval Research