UNSTRUCTURED
This paper aims to explore the general relationship between believing in conspiracy theories, and media preference to topics aiming to expand recent research suggesting that college students who have conspiratorial thinking tend to use social media to promote their conspiracy theories. This study surveyed a sample of 331 college students (230 male and 101 female) using the psychometric assessment of the Generic Conspiracist Beliefs Scale (GCBS), the most widely used measure of the general belief in conspiracy theories. The scale includes five related but distinct theory types: government malfeasance, extraterrestrial cover-ups, malevolent global conspiracies, personal well-being, and information control. This research demonstrated that most conspiracies that attract undergraduate students were ones that stated the reasons for the COVID-19 pandemic as a result of world conflict, as part of an international war, and as a result of the US-China trade war, and found that 58.44% of undergraduate students believe that COVID-19 is a global conspiracy. Among these, 35.67% said that this plot is part of a competition between China and the USA, 26.11% believe it is a biological war. Social media is an important part of these students’ information consumption: 71% prefer Facebook as the leading info resource on social media.