Conspiracy Theories, Social Media, and Trust in Institutions in Three Central European Countries

Conspiracy Theories, Social Media, and Trust in Institutions in Three Central European Countries.Many see social media platforms as a hotbed of conspiracy theories whose algorithms allow them to spread rapidly.Others argue that the reasons for the spread of conspiracy theories are other underlying factors, such as a lack of trust in institutions.In this paper, we examine the relationship between belief in conspiracy theories, social media use, and institutional trust in three Central European countries: The Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia.In addition to the individual effect of independent variables, we also examine their interaction effect on belief in conspiracy theories.Using multilinear regression analysis, we show that both social media and the lack of trust in state institutions contribute to belief in conspiracy theories to some extent in every country we examined.However, we also find that in the case of political institutions, low trust (as in the Czech Republic) as well as high trust (as in Slovakia) can drive belief in conspiracy theories, depending on the local political context.The interactional effect of social media use and institutional trust did not prove to be significant.The paper allows us to gain a better understanding of the social factors that contribute to the spread of conspiracy theories and argues for recognizing the importance of the local sociopolitical context.