The Dark Communication Repertoires of COVID-19 Protesters in Austria

And the final speaker in this packed IAMCR 2023 session on populism is Christian Wassner, whose focus is on the spread of conspiracy narratives during the COVID-19 pandemic, not least also through niche, alternative, and ‘dark’ platforms. The present project examines these ‘dark communication repertoires’ as they are employed by conspiracist groups on alternative platforms. These cannot be considered in isolation from one another, but need to be understood across actor groups and platforms within a complex social media environment.

It is possible to distinguish between different actors in this, though: innovators, early adopters, and followers; as well as politicians, experts, activists, celebrities, ordinary citizens, and others. The present project focussed on the Austrian COVID-19 protest movement during December 2021, across Telegram, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other platforms. It examined the age of participating accounts relative to the creation of each platform, and distinguished actor types observed in the data. It also explored the presence of conspiracy narratives in their posts.

This produced a number of categories: omnipresent extremes, who have multiple social media accounts and especially use Telegram and frequently share conspiracy narratives; omnipresent moderates, who similarly use multiple platforms but show a more moderate reference to conspiracy narratives, mainly on mainstream platforms; mainstream platform-oriented users, who are mostly on Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter; Telegram-focussed users, who are not very active on other platforms but have strong ideological focus; and minimalists, who have a low social media presence and a low prevalence of conspiracy narratives, and are mainly on Telegram.

Politicians are mostly omnipresent moderates, and ordinary citizens are mainly minimalists; innovators (the earliest users) are mostly omnipresent extremes, while mainstream platform-oriented users have few dark platform accounts.

Overall, Telegram thus plays a very central role in this study, but there is also an intensive cross-platform dissemination of conspiracy narratives. This also means that there is also a critical need for a cross-platform perspective in regulation.