Let me try to explain this conspiracy theorizing/political point-scoring about crisis events through a perspective that connects our natural processes of collective sensemaking to the current attention dynamics within our information systems. (Thread)

1) Crisis events are often characterized by uncertainty and ambiguity — e.g. around causes and impacts. During these events, people converge (increasingly online) to make sense of the event, to try to resolve uncertainty, and for those directly affected, to try to determine what actions to take.