Platform economics sustain a professional class of conspiracy merchants

Evidence

Elsewhere, some precincts of conspiracy culture have reached a new scale: monetized, commercialized, and weaponized. There are more and more “conspiracy entrepreneurs”—as Harvard researchers Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule have dubbed them—an army of people created by Twitter and Facebook and YouTube who make a living selling a heady blend of suspicion, hoaxes, and misinformation. Alex Jones and InfoWars is just the largest, most financially lucrative example, but there are thousands of others. — Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 115

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘conspiracy entrepreneurs’ as a credibly monetized class created by social platforms.
• XREF: The profit-driven perpetuation of suspicion maps to the vault’s claims about how prejudice is institutionally sustained rather than innate. — connects to: Disintermediated broadcasting displaced knowledge gatekeepers and enabled conspiracy entrepreneurs — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New…, 103; Platform algorithms delivered foreign propaganda to its most receptive audiences — Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 203; The attention economy captures pre-existing human communities onto platforms to monetize them — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!: A Manifesto of the…, 324 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Disintermediated broadcasting displaced knowledge gatekeepers and enabled conspiracy entrepreneurs #expands (0.85) — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying, 103
• Conspiracy movements depend on a symbiosis of believers and opportunists #expands (0.85) — Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy, 905
• Platform algorithms delivered foreign propaganda to its most receptive audiences #exemplifies (0.80) — Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 203
• The attention economy captures pre-existing human communities onto platforms to monetize them #expands (0.75) — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 324