Conspiracy Theory Discourse on 4chan

The next ECREA 2022 session is on the dissemination of genuine and problematic news, and I’m involved in two of the papers being presented. We start with Bradley Wiggins, whose focus is on conspiracy theory discourse on 4chan’s /Pol board.

The data for this work were collected by the DMI 4CAT tool, using terms such as ‘steal’ and ‘Trump’ during 3-9 January 2021. This is part of a larger spike in 4chan activity that commence from November 2021, during and after the US presidential election. Bradley also points out that Trump has a long history of cozying up with the alt-right, tweeting Pepe the Frog imagery as early as 2015, for instance.

The project identified a number of key phrases through a frequency analysis across the entire corpus; it then examined the use of such terms across the period being covered; these include terms such as the anti-Semitic signifier ‘(((‘, ‘Kek’ (for the fictional white supremacist nation of Kekistan), ‘MAGA’, ‘Q’, ‘Pence’, and ‘Replace’ (for various population replacement conspiracy theories).

The analysis also shows considerable disagreement between perspectives, however: some suggest that the election was rigged, while others say that it wasn’t but was meant to foment the Capitol riots; some believe in Q, while others believe that Q was part of an anti-Trump conspiracy.

Overall, this qualitative analysis confirms previous quantitative research that shows the lack of ideological coherence in 4chan that is nonetheless united in its conspiracism and white supremacism. There is also clearly a kind of chan-grammar of conspiracism; in order to function there, whatever your specific beliefs, you need to be conspiracist and express yourself as such. The medium is the message as long as conspiracism guides meaning-making.