Space lasers ignited wildfires in California. High-altitude vapour trails from aircraft are actually “chemtrails” containing mind-controlling chemicals. School-picture days are an international plot to gather surveillance data on future voters and consumers.
You wonder why anyone would fall for these and innumerable other conspiracy theories circulating on and off the internet, so clearly absurd and fact-free are they.
“It's not about the facts,” says Alison Meek, an associate professor of history at Western University’s King’s University College who researches and teaches conspiracy theories. “It's about why people are feeling it and why they believe it. [It’s] because they're angry, they're scared, they're lost. This is something for them, it's their flotation device in this chaos that we're living in.”
The universal need for sustaining devices in chaotic times such as ours, when we ricochet from economic uncertainty to climate change to international unrest, is only one of multiple reasons some of us are vulnerable to conspiratorial thinking. And while some are patently ridiculous, many conspiracy theories are far from harmless: they can sow hatred of others, warp our relationship to reality, even undermine faith in democracy. What’s more, getting those who have been sucked in back on the straight and narrow isn’t easy.
Conspiracy theories have been around seemingly forever. Barbarians were invited into imperial Rome to bring down the empire. Jews poisoned Gentiles’ wells in the Middle Ages. Freemasons, a fraternal order, were plotting to control the United States government in the early 1800s. President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 was cooked up by organized crime. The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic lockdown was a ploy by Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government to impose socialism on Canada.
Unlike the past, contemporary conspiratorial thinking, now supplemented by AI-generated deepfakes, moves at lightning speed thanks to the internet. And if we think Canadians are less likely to ingest disinformation than, say, our more polarized southern neighbours, Meek reminds us that “the internet doesn’t have a border.”
Indeed, a 2025 Leger poll for Elections Canada found 46 per cent of eligible Canadian voters (there are approximately 27.6 million eligible voters in Canada) accepted as definitely or probably true that a small group secretly manipulates world events. One third of those surveyed also said clandestine drug or technology experiments are carried out on Canadians. Belief in these and other conspiracy theories has gradually increased since 2021, according to the poll.
The proliferation of contemporary conspiracy theories can be traced, in part, to a deep, and frequently justified, distrust of traditional authority that grew from the freethinking, anti-establishment 1960s.
But humans are a storytelling species who use narrative to make sense of a capricious universe. If fewer of us are relying on traditionally authoritative (albeit hardly perfect) sources of information like non-cable TV news or mainstream newspapers, what will fill the void?
In many cases, it’s social media, with its algorithmic fondness for content that provokes fear, rage — anything except neutral reception — in its bid to keep us on the platform. And those conspiracy theories coughed up on the internet — among them, that cloud-seeding led to the 2025 floods in Texas that killed at least 135 people while bestowing an economic bonanza on businesses involved in reconstruction — certainly give us narratives.
The COVID-19 pandemic, when social isolation gripped us, became a breeding ground for conspiratorial thinking, including the belief that the World Economic Forum’s global recovery plan was a blueprint for tyrannical one-world government.
Conspiracy thinking also ramps up in troubled times because we seek simple answers to complex events, according to Meek. If economies take a tumble, for instance, “as opposed to trying to understand macro- and microeconomics and understanding globalization, it's ‘No, let's blame X.’”
Those simple, untrue answers can damage social cohesion, including family, friend and community relationships, which is ironic considering that one of the attractions of conspiratorial thinking is the communal sense of having joined a special group with inside knowledge.
Conspiracy theorizing can also threaten public health by, for example, casting doubt on vaccine safety.
More broadly, it can endanger democracy itself by igniting civic distrust, amplifying polarization and even laying the groundwork for an authoritarian leader who subsequently accuses his opponents of election fraud. As Meek points out, “you have a president sitting in the United States whose political career began with a conspiracy theory, which was the birther issue,” the questioning of then-president Barack Obama’s American birth.
Another cause for concern: People under 35 are slightly more susceptible to conspiratorial thinking than other cohorts, according to Daniel Stockemer, a political studies professor at the University of Ottawa who researches the impacts of conspiracy beliefs.
Often lacking deep political engagement and knowledge, “They don't feel represented [which] makes them susceptible to other narratives,” Stockemer says. “They don't feel they're part of democracy, so they're looking for alternatives. And one alternative is conspiracy theories.”
Younger people may operate in an “ideological vacuum,” he says, causing them to drift into a conspiratorial mentality where belief in one conspiracy leads to the belief in others.
Conspiracy thinking “creates alternative worlds,” he adds. “Look at the U.S. The MAGA movement is built on conspiracies, half-truths, misinformation. This can put the whole country on the wrong track.”
If our future leaders are on the wrong track, we — and they — have a problem.
So, what do you do if your brother-in-law starts spouting off about lizard people running the world at the next family dinner? Try conceding that he may have a point, which opens the door for conversation rather than confrontation. From there, ask about evidence for the theory: what’s the source, can it be verified, are there other interpretations? Be prepared for similar questions when you present your evidence. Be patient, keep a sense of humour, peel back the layers.
Maybe you’ll change your brother-in-law’s mind. Maybe you won’t. But at least you’ll have stood up for the facts.