The term "conspiracy theory" has become extremely popular in the last decade or so, most often used as a dismissive term to discredit someone's claims: "That's just an unfounded conspiracy theory."
The term quite literally means: A hypothesis that some entities, usually some people in power or with a lot of influence, or some organizations, are secretly conspiring among themselves in order to do something that the public would object to, or may even be outright illegal, or to hide some kind of facts from the public and give them a completely false or distorted narrative.
Obviously, the key elements of a "conspiracy theory" is that it involves a "theory", in other words, an uncorroborated unproven hypothesis, and a "conspiracy", in other words two or more people or entities scheming secretly behind the scenes, agreeing among themselves to keep their (or some other) actions or facts hidden from the public.
If such a conspiracy theory is proven as true (for example outright in a court of law), then it stops being a "theory" and it's just an outright "conspiracy". Some forms of conspiracy may be explicitly illegal in many jurisdictions (eg. conspiracy to overthrow or undermine the government, for instance.)
However, due to its sheer overuse, particularly during the last decade, many people are using the term "conspiracy theory" in situations where it doesn't apply. Its meaning has diluted, broadened and become fuzzier. Which isn't very surprising, of course, as that tends to happen to many terms and ideas that gain huge popularity.
For example: "He stole the wallet." "That's just a conspiracy theory."
No, it isn't, unless there really was some kind of conspiracy between two or more people behind the scenes to eg. plan this wallet heist.
Indeed, the term "conspiracy theory" is more and more frequently being used to just mean a more generic "unfounded accusation", rather than "unfounded hypothesis of two or more entities conspiring to do something objectionable." In other words, any claim that is in dispute is often called a "conspiracy theory", even if no conspiracy of any kind is involved. The entire meaning of the term has changed.
"Conspiracy theory" does not mean "unproven accusation."
But it gets even worse than that.
Sometimes people equate the very term "conspiracy" with "conspiracy theory". In other words, the word "conspiracy" itself is being thought of as meaning "conspiracy theory", ie. the hypothesis that some secret behind-the-scenes conspiracy is going on.
Indeed, sometimes you even see people writing something like: "It's not a conspiracy anymore!" when some conspiracy theory has been (at least allegedly) corroborated as true.
Of course what they mean is "it's not a theory anymore!" but they are using the word "conspiracy" on its own to mean "conspiracy theory", and thus if the theory becomes proven as true, then it's "not a conspiracy" anylonger because it's true!
Thus you may get completely asinine and contradictory sentences like "it's not a conspiracy, it actually happened!" (Of course it should be "it's not just a theory, it actually happened!")
It's amazing how overuse of a term often ends up diluting and distorting its meaning, so people end up using it completely incorrectly.
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