On February 6, 2023, two earthquakes struck southern Türkiye within hours of each other and killed more than 50,000 people. While rescuers were still searching the rubble, a different explanation for the disaster spread online. The earthquakes, according to this account, were not natural. Foreign powers had caused them on purpose, using a secret weapon called HAARP. HAARP is a real atmospheric research program in Alaska. In the conspiracy theory it became a device that can set off earthquakes from a distance. One version that spread widely placed the device aboard the large foreign ships passing through the Bosphorus in Istanbul.
Psychology has a standard explanation for why people reach for stories like this. Conspiracy theories, the argument goes, are the consolation of the powerless. Uscinski and Parent (2014) summed it up in one line: “conspiracy theories are for losers.” They appeal to people on the losing side of an election or a policy, people who feel they have no control over events. Survey data support part of the picture. Across 26 countries, people who feel politically powerless report stronger conspiracy beliefs (Imhoff et al., 2022). A related claim points to cognitive factors, such as low education or a tendency to jump to conclusions (Douglas et al., 2017).
But this explanation predicts the wrong people. If conspiracy belief belongs to those who feel powerless, the HAARP theory should have spread among the government’s opponents, the people who had spent two decades out of power. Instead it spread among the incumbent’s own supporters. Their party had governed Türkiye without interruption for more than twenty years, and they were about to vote it back into office.
The pattern looks strange only until you read what the conspiracy theory claims. If a foreign weapon caused the earthquake, then the government that failed to enforce building codes is no longer responsible. The disaster turns into an attack from abroad rather than a failure at home. A conspiracy theory like this defends those in power instead of challenging them.
This fits a distinction researchers have drawn in recent years. Most conspiracy theories aim upward, at powerful targets: intelligence agencies, bankers, global elites. Some aim downward, at groups with little real power, such as immigrants or religious minorities (Nera et al., 2021). Downward theories tend to help whoever is already in charge, by turning public anger toward a convenient enemy. The HAARP theory aims upward, since it blames foreign powers stronger than the Turkish state. But in function it does the work of a downward one, protecting the government at home.
This is the question my colleagues Sinan Alper, Onur Varol, and I examined in a study published this year in Political Psychology. We approached it in two ways.
First, we collected 38,884 tweets about the theory, posted by 26,992 users in the days after the earthquakes. We sorted those users by which politician they followed. Accounts that followed President Erdoğan produced and shared far more of the conspiracy content than accounts that followed his main opponent.
The second study was built to be more reliable. It was preregistered, meaning we fixed our hypotheses and analyses before seeing any data. The data came from a nationally representative survey of 3,568 people, interviewed face-to-face by a polling company in the weeks after the earthquakes, ahead of the May election. People were asked how much they blamed various actors for the destruction, including foreign powers using secret technologies. The more strongly a person endorsed that explanation, the more likely they were to plan to vote for the government. A higher conspiracy score predicted about a 35 percent higher chance of voting for Erdoğan.
This association held after we accounted for age, education, income, and whether the person had lost someone in the earthquakes. The effect did not disappear once education was in the model. So the belief was not simply a sign of who was less informed. It was tracking something political: support for a government that the conspiracy theory helped excuse. Figure 1 summarizes the argument.
Türkiye is not a special case. After COVID-19 spread, some of Donald Trump’s claims about the origin of the virus pointed the blame at China and away from the response at home. National pride and conspiracy belief tend to rise together at moments like these, a pattern found across 56 countries (Sternisko et al., 2023).
Conspiracy Theories Essential Reads
Two cautions are in order. Our data are correlational, so they show that belief and voting go together, not that anyone planned the conspiracy theory as propaganda. And the powerless do still reach for conspiracy theories. The opposition in Türkiye has its own (Nefes & Aksoy, 2024). Both sides can put a conspiracy theory to work.
Still, the finding shifts the question worth asking. When a disaster is quickly followed by a story about a foreign enemy, the reflex is to ask who could believe something so far-fetched. The more useful question is who the belief helps. The answer is not always the person searching for comfort. Often, it is the people already in power who would rather the public look outward than at them.