People seeking to radicalize others use targeted advertising to push conspiracy theories and extremist views.
The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research.
Advertising to an audience of one Advertising is clearly powerful. The right ad campaign can help shape or create demand for a new product or rehabilitate the image of an older product or even of an entire company or brand. Political campaigns use similar strategies to push candidates and ideas, and historically countries have used them to wage propaganda wars.
Consequently, social media has a greater ability to expose people to ideas as fast as they individually will accept them. The same mechanisms that can recommend a niche consumer product to just the right person or suggest an addictive substance just when someone is most vulnerable can also suggest an extreme conspiracy theory just when a person is ready to consider it.
Another important part of the answer is that people seeking to radicalize others lay out trails of breadcrumbs to more and more extreme positions. The result of these radicalization pipelines is apparent. Rather than most people having moderate views with fewer people holding extreme views, fewer and fewer people are in the middle.
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