COVID-19 Conspiracy Theories on Telegram

The next speakers in this AoIR 2022 session are Eugenia Siapera and Sanaz Rasti (I think – sorry, missed Sanaz’s last name). Their focus is on alt-tech platforms, and while they point out that alternative platforms are not necessarily only for the far right, there are some substantial far-right uses of these platforms at this point. This paper especially investigates the Telegram platform. Such platforms have been used as a refuge for refugees from mainstream platforms following their deplatforming, and enable them to further foment their extreme views; they have played a role in a range of political debates not least also in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Health narratives become politicised on these platforms, becoming more contentious, antagonistic, and linked with specific ideologies; they also become linked with other contentious topics and embedded into a wider problematic worldview. But by what criteria do we classify these as problematic: their legitimacy, facticity, irrationality, or lack of critical ability?

The project explored this through a digital ethnography of Telegram channels and groups, and also used topic modelling to extract the key topics these spaces addressed, in order to validate the ethnographic observations. The topic modelling drew on Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), Non-Negative Matrix Factorisation (NMF), and Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA).

Cross-cutting topics relating to COVID-19 across the various channels included vaccine safety, politics, nationalism and globalism, children, and the media, while topics unique to specific channels included climate scepticism, culture wars, country-specific protests, masks and testing, and various conspiracy theories. Vaccine safety concerns served as the beginning of the COVID-19 story; supposed dangers for children emerged as another key issue; responsibility for this was then attributed to politicians and the media; they were also seen as pawns in the hands of the ‘global elite’; and as a solution to this users proposed resistance, civil disobedience, and a return to strong nationalism.

Connector topics between these channels and beliefs were especially concerns about a ‘global elite’ that was also pushing war and climate change rhetoric, and their enablement by mainstream media and Big Tech. Since these patterns persist for the pandemic, climate change, and the war in Ukraine, it is evident that any major new events appear to be fitted into this persistent conspiracist ideology.

Are such world views problematic because of the perspectives they reflect, then, or can they also be understood as an anxious and critical reading of the present moment? Criticism of global institutions itself is not inherently problematic, and the patterns shown here also reveal simply a reading of world events through a hermeneutics of suspicion; for participants, there are also pleasures associated with these critical readings.

But are they genuinely critical readings? Such critique also runs the risk of becoming hubristic if it exempts itself from valid critiques in turn; if it sees any critique directed at it only as attacks from ‘the system’ then it has lost its critical force. By now, perhaps these discussions are used more by microcelebrities jostling for influence in these fringe milieux.