[mikkupikku]

> "Conspiracy theories involve "people who share a certain set of characteristics have similar incentives and therefore act in similar ways that aren't good for the rest of us" by definition, that's what a "conspiracy" is."

No, that's not conspiracy. Conspiracy requires deliberate collusion between members of the conspiracy, it requires conspiring. If you have several people behaving in a way that appears coordinated because those people have aligned values and incentives, then it might be possible that those people have talked to each other and come up with some sort of a plan, which would make it a conspiracy, but it's also possible that no such organization exists and they're each independently doing whatever they think is correct in their circumstance. In that case, the emergent group behavior looks like a conspiracy but literally isn't a conspiracy.

This is what Manufacturing Consent talks about. I wish people would read it.