An Australian parliamentarian - One Nation leader Pauline Hanson - has been caught on hidden camera appearing to question the 1996 Port Arthur massacre, where a gunman shot and killed 35 people.

"A lot of questions there," she said in the recording, which was filmed as part of an Al Jazeera covert investigation.

On Thursday afternoon, Hanson denied suggesting there was a conspiracy, claiming the recording was heavily edited and a "political attack" by Al Jazeera and the ABC (which broadcast the footage). She said there was "no question in my mind that Martin Bryant was the only person responsible."

When Hack posted the story on its Facebook page on Thursday, we had a tonne of pro-conspiracy comments from people who appeared to be sympathetic to the idea Port Arthur was a government conspiracy: "It seems people don't like us to have thinking brains," one person wrote. Another said, "We're not allowed to question anymore". Another: "If we don't think outside of the box we miss things".

What's going on? From Pizzagate to chemtrails to 'false flags' and 'crisis actors', why do conspiracy theories seem to be everywhere now?

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Whatsapp Pizzagate: Police secure the scene near a Washington pizza restaurant, after a man, who said he was investigating a conspiracy theory about Hillary Clinton running a child sex ring out of the pizza place, fired an assault rifle inside the restaurant.

Last year, Professor Colin Klein from the Centre of Philosophy of the Sciences at the Australian National University published a paper that looked at this question.

The study was a big data analysis of 2.2 million comments from roughly 130,000 distinct usernames over eights years on the conspiracy forum of reddit. It interrogated the stereotype of conspiracy theorists as middle-aged men in a basements wearing tinfoil hats.

"Things that would have been confined to a small minority of people - and you would have to go and seek out at shady book stores and conventions - is now very easy to get exposed to, even unintentionally through Facebook," Professor Klein told Hack.

"There is a much wider dissemination of these ideas and [more] people who have encountered and heard about them even if they're not fully into it."

"A lot of people, when they think conspiracy theories, they think of [The X Files'] Fox Mulder and everything connects to everything else."

"But when you look online there's a much larger base of people willing to think about conspiracy theory."

'The last believers in an ordered universe'

In 1999, Brian Keeley, a Professor of Philosophy in the US, described conspiracy theorists as the "last believers in an ordered universe".

He proposed conspiracy theories are fundamentally a response to existential terror: a crutch to make up for the inherent disorder and chaos that comes with seeing random death and unfair circumstances on the news all day.

"By supposing that current events are under the control of nefarious agents, conspiracy theories entail that such events are capable of being controlled," he wrote.

"In an earlier time, it would have been natural to believe in an ordered world, in which God and other supernatural agents exercised significant influence and control."

The conspiratorial world view offers us the comfort of knowing that while tragic events occur, they at least occur for a reason, and that the greater the event, the greater and more significant the reason.

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Whatsapp Professor Keeley was writing after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, where Timothy McVeigh drove a truck bomb into a federal government building, killing 168 people and injuring more than 500. Conspiracy theorists argued he had been framed and shadowy government forces were responsible.

In the hours after the Christchurch shooting, users on 8chan messageboards had already begun speculating this was a "false flag" attack - suggesting it could have been a government-staged secret operation. Others speculated the victims were "crisis actors" who had not been killed.

There was a mood of disassociation and unreality, as users competed to appear the most cynical about the truth of the massacre being reported by the media.

This response may appear to confirm Professor Keeley's ideas about people trying to explain away random death, but it also shows how conspiracy theories are social, and making them up and sharing them is a way of interacting with others (or just shitposting other trolls).

Professor Klein told Hack that many conspiracy theorists are not "true believers" who obsessively connect seemingly unrelated events - from the moon landings to the assassination of JFK - in order to impose order, but rather they could be taking part in a more piecemeal way.

"There's a participatory aspect where they're coming up with stories," he said.

"Internet forums are really conducive to that.

"My impression is in the old days if you had conspiracy theories there was a lot of social stigma and you had to be really into it if you were into it at all.

"On the online forums you have lot of people who are like 'Well I have some questions and I'm not sure about this and not sure about that'."

In December 2016, a 28-year-old man marched into a pizza restaurant in Washington, D.C, and fired three shots from an assault rifle. He later told police had he planned to "self-investigate" the extensively discredited and debunked conspiracy theory the pizza restaurant was at the centre of an alleged child sex ring that included high-ranking officials of the Democratic Party.

The theory had originated on 4chan and Reddit.

"As far as I can tell that was just 4chan trolls screwing around and making up this absurd and cynical story," Professor Klein said.

"They were performing a certain trollish cynicism and one-upmanship.

Then you get people who are taking it deadly serious and take a gun to the pizza parlour.

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Whatsapp Pizzagate gunman Edgar Maddison Welch surrenders to police in Washington.

12 distinct subgroups of conspiracy theorists

Professor Klein's big data analysis found the "true believers" were just the "tip of the iceberg" of posters on the /conspiracy subreddit.

The groups included:

The downtrodden - who appeared to be communication about conspiracy theories as a way of expressing general frustration with authority

Anti-imperialists - who were suspicious of US foreign policy

Anti-semites and white supremacists

Anti-gun control advocates - who tended to believe that any mass shooting was a 'false flag' operation

In all, they identified 12 distinct subgroups of individuals who used language in different ways and who varied widely in their interests and their posting habits.

What they talked about strongly suggested that they held different beliefs and attitudes about a range of conspiracies, Professor Klein said.

"There's an interesting intermediate state where people don't fully believe but don't disbelieve either - sometimes a lot of what's going on voicing political frustrations."

For example, a lot of people who say 'Bush did 9/11' ... what they really want to say is 'F*** Bush'. That guy doesn't care about us.

"It becomes a convenient way to express a lot of political disaffection."

This links to the other reason for the apparent increase in conspiracy theories: a breakdown of trust in institutions like government and the media.

In 1999, Professor Keeley was writing after the Oklahoma City bombing and the subsequent theory that it had been carried out by the US Government who wished to sway public sentiment, and not by the convicted terrorist Timothy McVeigh.

"The millennium is nigh, and with each passing year, the American consciousness is increasingly in the grip of conspiratorial thinking," Professor Keeley wrote.

He gave a list of conspiracies doing the rounds at the time, including aliens are abducting humans and "all transatlantic communications are monitored and recorded by the the US National Security Agency."

As it turned out, the NSA conspiracy theory wasn't so far wrong.

This year alone, a royal commission has found shocking evidence of misconduct and greed in the Australian financial sector, and Australia's highest ranking Catholic, Cardinal George Pell, has been convicted of sexual offences against two teenage boys.

"There's a group of people who have a lot of disaffection around abuses of power," Professor Klein said.

"If you've had a bad experience with the legal system - if you're poor or a minority, that's not unlikely - you may think the system is rigged.

"That's a good first step to conspiracy theories, and the interesting thing is that it's not wholly unreasonable to think of crooked people doing bad things."