Elon Musk spreads unfounded conspiracy theory about Paul Pelosi attack on Twitter https://t.co/yG8cqxzIzf pic.twitter.com/7rY8b6bGgX — CNN iReport (@CNNiReporter) July 14, 2017
And yet, a study released Friday by Stanford University suggests that this is exactly what is going on.
It’s also an important reminder of just how much we don’t know about the internet, especially when it comes to conspiracy theories.
A new study from Stanford researchers claims to have found a correlation between the amount of information available about an online person and how believable that person might be. The study, which looked at 6,500 internet pages and 600,000 comments on them, was run after someone posted a comment on Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s Twitter account, where he claimed that a woman in Washington, D.C. was “going crazy” over his comments from the 2016 election.
A study from Stanford University claims to have found a correlation between the amount of information available about an online person and how believable that person might be. The study, which looked at 6,500 internet pages and 600,000 comments on them, was run after someone posted a comment on Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s Twitter account, where he claimed that a woman in Washington D.C. was “going crazy” over his comments from the 2016 election.
Here’s how things unfolded: According to the Palo Alto, Calif., school of science, a woman in Washington tweeted that Musk was a “corrupt sociopath” who should “be locked away for the rest of his life.” Musk’s response was not only to go through and delete her tweet, but to also claim that all information about who he was and where he lived was a “giant conspiracy,” suggesting that she’d mischaracterized him based on the information available online. The woman responded with her real name, but Musk continued his conspiracy theory, claiming that he had to delete it due to “a massive, giant conspiracy.”
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