The Evolution of Conspiracy Theories as a Form of Connective Action

The next speaker in this AoIR 2022 session is Marc Tuters. He begins by noting the ‘dark sense of foreboding’ that is present in the world today, and notes that this is determined at least in part by the mediation of the current moment. Such foreboding provides the ground for the dissemination of material related to COVID-19 conspiracy theories, but this dissemination also blurs a variety of conspiracist material with other posts that in turn make fun of these conspiracy theories.

Conspiracy theorists interpret supposedly ‘hidden knowledge’ and connect it across domains in order to support their worldviews; this develops a feverish connection between various factoids, and we can thus think of conspiracy theorists as ‘compulsive dot-connecters’. This can also be understood as a form of connective action, following Bennett & Segerberg. But contrary to conventional connective action, which does not require a collective ‘we’ to be constructed, it does produce a collective ‘them’ to which the conspiracy theorists are opposed.

The present project explored this further through a mapping of engagement on Instagram, identifying the most-engaged images from Instagram posts with relevant COVID-19 conspiracy hashtags, and computationally grouping these together by content styles. This showed a great deal of partisan pro-Trump content that was indistinguishable from QAnon content; of reheated content relating to the Pizzagate conspiracy theory; of keyword-stuffing (the overuse of relevant hashtags and keywords) in posts; and almost no critical or mocking content (contrary to what has been observed on Twitter).

The overuse of hashtags in posts also makes them, and their intersections, machine-readable for the Instagram algorithms, literally connecting these various conspiracy theories and conspiracist groups. In particular, they serve to connect QAnon rhetoric with broader conspiracy theories about the ‘Great Reset’. Some of this is concerned about data-extractive techno-capitalism, informed for instance by the writings of Naomi Klein and amplified by conspiracist influencers like Russell Brand, but also tying into actual rhetoric by organisations like the World Economic Forum that does talk about a necessary ‘reset’ for global capitalism. This deliberately reinterprets futurist thinking as a global plan for population control.

The World Economic Forum is its own worst enemy here: arguably, it has lost control of its narrative, and its attempts to regain that control only add further fuel to the conspiracist binfire. Conspiracist posts have picked up on the WEF’s language, and voice concerns that may well echo broader concerns in mainstream society. In this way, the WEF in particular, and organisations like it, have genuinely positioned as the ‘them’ that must be opposed.