Bill Gates as a Floating Signifier: Studying COVID-19 Conspiracy Theories

It’s a suspiciously sunny Wednesday in London, so I must be at the Social Media & Society 2024 conference, where I start by chairing a panel on mis-and disinformation. My excellent QUT colleague Kateryna Kasianenko is the first presenter, whose paper focusses on COVID-19 conspiracy theories. She starts with conspiracies around the role of Bill and Melinda Gates (and other philanthropists) in global crises – they are often targets of conspiracy theories which claim that they had a role in secret plots to create such crises.

Conspiracy theories can be understood as presenting webs of floating signifiers, enabling a politics of falsehood that promotes problematic information. In the context of the COVID-19 crisis, communities mobilised to promote Africa-centric conspiracy theories around the Gates Foundation; these were disseminated via social media platforms; and in doing so developed the content of these mis- and disinformation campaigns.

Network analyses of the spread of such conspiracy theories on Twitter during 2021 show various clusters of accounts that are often geographically defined; key topics emerging from this relate to global liberal elites (pushed especially by anti-mask protesters and Trump-adjacent users as well as accounts from Nigeria and South Africa); Gates as Satan (by conservative accounts in the US and UK as well as Nigerian and South African accounts); Gates as a colonialist (largely by Nigerian and South African accounts, as well as UK and US conservatives); but also Gates as humanitarian (contesting the narratives of pro-Trump and right-wing accounts).

Gates philanthropy was not given a fixed meaning, therefore; its understanding was diverse and contested. Historical grievances coloured understandings, and networked discursive alliances formed to reject such philanthropy from a number of perspectives and for a number of reasons. Such understandings were relatively fixed, and rarely changed over time. Perhaps philanthropists need to be decentred in humanitarian communication, then, in order to keep good humanitarian work from being dragged into conspiracist rhetoric.