Conspiracies and Algorithms: How Reddit’s Conspiracy Community Perceives Algorithm-Driven Social Automation

This study examines how conspiracy communities on Reddit perceive and critique algorithms, emphasizing the need to integrate individual and socially centered approaches to understand algorithm-driven social automation more broadly. As algorithms increasingly influence decisions across public and private sectors, concerns about transparency, social control, and manipulation have grown. Despite policy and technical interventions aimed at addressing algorithmic harms, public skepticism and conspiracy theories remain widespread. Through a mixed-methods analysis of 10,087 threads, this study finds that conspiracy communities share public concerns such as information integrity and surveillance. However, certain perceptions of algorithms are particularly associated with engagement in conspiratorial thinking. Specifically, perceptions focused on speculative impacts and hidden motivations, such as suspicions of mass surveillance or financial manipulation, are especially likely to be associated with conspiracy theories. In addition, viewing algorithms as symbols of pervasive social automation is more strongly associated with conspiratorial narratives, whereas technical views are less so. Experience with specific algorithms does not straightforwardly correspond to lower conspiracy engagement; rather, interpretations and social framing play a more important role. The findings underscore the importance of viewing algorithmic perceptions, critiques, and resistances within broader social, cultural, and political contexts, showing that algorithmic harm involves technical harms, structural and institutional harms, and perceived harms shaped by user interpretation. The findings suggest that effective algorithmic governance must go beyond individual literacy training and technical fixes, while also addressing the broader institutional and political conditions that sustain distrust.