There are countless conspiracy theories circulating around social media. Just look for a few minutes and you’ll hear that 9/11 was actually perpetrated by the US Government, that the coronavirus pandemic is all just a hoax, or that Hilary Clinton was running a child sex-trafficking ring out of a pizza shop. For most of us, we see that these conspiracy theories are just insane, but can we actually make that case with math and with data? Thanks to some work by a researcher at Oxford University, it turns out we can.

Welcome to Data Demystified. I’m Jeff Galak, and in this episode we’ll look at the math of why conspiracies like the ones I mentioned before are just incredibly unlikely to be real. Now, to be clear, there are some conspiracies that are, or at least, were real. Watergate was a conspiracy to cover up illegal behavior by then President Richard Nixon. The Tuskegee syphilis conspiracy was an attempt by the US Public Health Service to cover up experimentation on African-American men. And the NSA’s PRISM program was a conspiracy to conceal how much spying was done by the US Government on its own citizens. But we know about those conspiracies because of one of two reasons. For Watergate, it was, in large part, the incompetence of a group of burglars that led to the eventual break in the conspiracy. And for both the Tuskegee conspiracy and the NSA PRISM conspiracy, it was a whistleblower who broke things wide open. Dr. Peter Buxton exposed the Tuskegee experiments in 1972 and Eward Snowden exposed the PRISM conspiracy in 2013.

The point is that whenever you have conspiracies, even massive ones, and maybe even especially massive ones, they seem to fall apart either due to incompetence like with Watergate or to whistleblowers like with Tuskegee and PRISM. But just how likely is that to happen? That’s where the math comes in

Link to academic paper that this is all based off of: https://journals.plos.org/plos....one/article?id=10.13

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