The next speaker in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Lucie Čejková, who shifts our focus to conspiracism as a now fairly common style of thinking, which has potential implications for democratic societies. The role of social media sites in all this has been especially highlighted here, in both academic research and public debate, and of course social media platforms remain a key source of news for a large part of the population, too.
The present study examines the link between social media use and individual conspiracism through a systematic literature review of some 160 articles between 2020 and 2026; this is a subset of the overall literature in this space, much of which tends to focus more on the content of conspiracist materials than on the users who engage with it.
These articles were further screened because many did not address individual conspiracism; or did not focus on engagement with social media platforms (as opposed to instant messaging platforms). This left some 33 articles, which were overwhelmingly quantitative in their approach – interviews or ethnographic research were largely absent here.
Most of these studies (76%) dealt with specific conspiracist beliefs – mostly related to COVID-19, vaccines, election fraud, QAnon, 9/11, the Epstein files, and chemtrails, which also indicates a strong U.S. focus here. The rest addressed general conspiracism (the conspiracist mindset and thinking styles). Social media use was assessed largely (in 73%) through self-reporting of use frequency, exposure, and source reliance; this was largely across platforms rather than reporting platform-specific results. Attitudinal, cognitive, and active engagement was much less common, and only some studies also explored specific content (e.g. debunked stories) or niche platforms like Truth Social.
Overall, findings indicated a relationship between more news and more conspiracism, and between greater social media skepticism and less conspiracism. But such findings largely focus on health and political topics, with few studies presenting findings on critical engagement with news on social media, or social media information literacy. There is a substantial need for more evidence beyond crises like COVID-19, for more research on general conspiracism and specific social media platforms, for longitudinal and qualitative research, and for research beyond the WEIRD world.
