Learning from the Ex-Believers: Individuals' Journeys In and Out of Conspiracy Theories Online

Conspiracy theories in online spaces, such as anti-vaccination or QAnon, present a unique amalgamation of misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda disguised in entertaining, attention-grabbing content that may appeal to peoples' cultural, moral, or social identities. Studies aiming to understand how people may engage with conspiracy theory content online, or how they may lose belief in conspiracy theories often approach research from a purely theoretical or empirical point of view. In this work, through in-depth interviews with former believers of more than 12 conspiracy theories, with experiences across almost two decades and numerous online platforms, we aim to contribute an understanding of how various online and offline factors synergize to shape a user's engagement, tenure, and disengagement in online conspiracy theorizing. We further investigate how some users recover from conspiracy theorizing with the help of online recovery communities. We find how pre-existing biases and predispositions towards conspiracy theorizing often carry over in online spaces where a user's conspiracy theory worldviews further evolve through content recommendations, interactions in online communities, and socially-primed self-reflections. We also find reasons, such as exposure to inconsistencies in theories or toxicity and anti-social attitudes in online spaces, through which users get disillusioned from conspiracy theories. Our work has implications in bringing forward often unobserved impacts of internet-mediated conspiracy theorizing on the believers---the resulting mental health issues such as depression, distrust and anxiety, and social isolation---which is comparable to the indoctrination trauma. Moreover, our interviews reveal an important role played by online communities in helping users recover from conspiracy theory beliefs by finding empathy and solidarity in fellow former believers. We conclude by providing a path forward for how social computing researchers can contribute online community designs that aid existing issues surrounding safety, inclusivity, and lack of resources in existing online conspiracy theory recovery communities.