The Role of Screenshots in Conspiracy Theories

The next session at AoIR 2023 that I’m in is on conspiracies, and starts with Elisabetta Zurovac, whose focus is on COVID-19 conspiracy theories. These seek to undermine trust in the established science and mainstream media coverage, and this is related to a broader erosion of trust in established knowledge. They encourage people to ‘do their own research’ and are often building also in important ways on visual content.

The visual culture of conspiracy theories draws in important ways also on screenshotting practices: images produced by screen capturing functions on digital devices which claim a certain documentary nature and appeal to notions of transparency even though they might also be modified and tampered with. Such content can also be seen as risky as it might leak and share content in a non-consensual manner, however; in general such screenshots materialise and detach content from its original context, and this can also be a form of cherry-picking.

So, what kind of content does screenshotting tend focus on? The focus of the present study is on Telegram, whose groups have thus far still escaped major public scrutiny even in spite of its key role in COVID denialism; the channels examined here were identified through the work of an Italian fact-checking site, BUTAC, and their posts were collected over the course of one year.

There are three main thematic strands in the screenshotting: of mainstream media content and social media posts by major public figures (politicians, experts), which is shared without direct links to the original source content (thus undermining the ability of users to follow up and verify these screenshots); of alternative sources (that often claim to have uncovered some previously unknown scoop that the mainstream media won’t tell you about), which are often presented with links to further information and which are positioned to represent the community of the conspiracists sharing them; and of highly localised or specialised, raw information found for instance in public reports, online documents, Google trends, and Telegram content, which is shared with instructions on how to read such content (and sometimes with links) and is therefore aiming to produce new information from scratch.

These might be described as representing different personalities of conspiracy theorists: the watchdog, the amplifier, and the expert/explorer, respectively. Common to these is that they are organising networks of conspiracists by sharing screenshot ‘news’, and that for them everything can be mobilised – and weaponised – as ‘proof’ in favour of their claims.