Usually they are a difference of opinion between experts in their field. And the average person is not conversant with the intricacies in that field to weigh up the evidence independently.
But that simply isn't true, and reducing something like anti-vaxxers or climate change deniers to "well the experts disagree!" is peak conspiracy theory-talk. Its just another tactic. There are plenty of things where the scientific community HAS (generally) formed a consensus, but conspiracy theories and people with an agenda will latch onto the odd rando with a PhD in order to promote the myth and lie that "but experts disagree."
It doesn't take much research at all to discover that 99.99% of the global scientific community is in agreement that analyse of C19's genomic code shows it cannot have been created in a lab, that only one largely discredited paper from two people who have a financial agenda and dubious political backing say otherwise, that it's simply not plausible that thousands of scientists from a dozen different countries would all enter into a mass conspiracy to protect China. It's also telling that whenever posters say "well some experts say it was created in a lab" they are never able to provide any information (which I have provided) into who these "experts" are. Most people saying "well I think Covid was created in a lab because I don't trust the Chinese you know what the Chinese government is like and anyway experts are divided!!" haven't bothered to do even a cursory Google search, they've just seen one Facebook post or one Mumsnet post claiming "some experts say it's manmade" and are parroting it without question. Yet according to the pro-conspiracy theorist/Q-Anon posters, conspiracy theorists are highly educated people who spend their time diligently researching peer-reviewed journal articles. That's just bollocks. It's pretty clear some of the CT posters on this thread haven't even spent 30 seconds on google, much less read reams of scientific journals.
Look at the posts confidently stating that mRNA vaccines have never been tested on humans before, when simply entering "mRNA human vaccine trials" into Google immediately throws up a thousand results on... mRNA human vaccine trials, including the actual study published in the Lancet on the major mRNA vaccine human trial which started all the way back in 2013 and lasted for more than two years.
That's what's dangerous: blindly believing everything you read online, cherry picking information, not accepting that things like scientific consensus exists, and rejecting any facts that don't fit your agenda.
My point is social media is activly giving people fake information on their fears and with algorithms its a recipe for disaster and it does worry me about the future of people getting their information and i think this links to conspiracy theories because they pedal fake news
I completely agree. I have a very slight personal connection/insight into the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the weaponisation of fake news and social media manipulation honestly terrifies me.