The best way to learn to spot a conspiracy theory is to make one yourself.

That's the idea behind this tool. You pick a real event, a culprit, and a motive, and then you build a fake conspiracy theory step by step. Each step uses one of the four moves real conspiracists rely on, with a debunk running alongside.

Once you've done it once, you can't un-see it. You learn that coming up with a plausible-sounding conspiracy theory is easy — and that for any one event you can generate many different theories that all contradict each other. The number of possible conspiracies is unlimited, which is part of why so few of them are real.

The four moves are explained on the recipe page. If you teach, there's also a lesson plan you can use in class.