"Conspiracy theories adapt easily to virtually any political environment, but social unrest, polarization, and a recognized history of state secrecy are part of their natural habitat. In my view, however, conspiracy is less a function of politics than of information. It's probably easy to understand how conspiracy theories could thrive under a restrictive media regime: in the absence of reliable information, people fill in the blank spots with speculation. This was certainly the case in the Soviet Union, for instance, when people took for granted that they were being lied to. But conspiracy is also quite at home in informational systems based on surplus rather than shortage. The media environment in the United States, with its multiple private television channels offering radically different worldviews, allows viewers of Fox News and readers of Breitbart to live in a world that routinely excludes facts that might contradict it."
James Devitt in 2019 at NYU News interviews Eliot Borenstein about the appeal of conspiracy theories.
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