Conspiracy Theory Dynamics across Alternative and Mainstream, Social and News Media Platforms

The final day at ECREA 2024 begins for me with a panel on conspiracy theories, and a paper by the great Annett Heft. Her focus is on the diffusion dynamics of conspiracy theories across platforms. She begins by noting the substantial growth in conspiracy theory diffusion, and the severe consequences these ideas can have. Cross-platform activity (involving social media, social messaging, multimedia platforms, alternative news media, and mainstream media) can further heighten this impact.

This project focusses on the two far-right conspiracy theories of the New World Order, with a strong anti-Semitic component, and the Great Replacement / White Genocide. The project examines how these conspiracy theories spread across platforms over a timespan of ten years. Diffusion here is understood as the result of independent decisions by actors, and might involve alternative and fringe social media platforms, mainstream social media platforms, alternative media, and legacy media, and the focus is on English-language discourse.

Each platform is likely to have a specific function here, and different actors are likely to play different roles. Data collection across platforms (4chan, Twitter, Reddit, alternative, and legacy media) used a dictionary approach, and data were then classified using DistilBERT; cross-platform contagion effects were examined using vector autoregression models, and there was also a focus on key change points over time.

Over time, discussions and coverage of a topic like the Great Replacement grew considerably especially from the mid-2010s onwards. The platforms broadly move together, but individual platforms also break out at times and become more prominent in their own right. It is also possible to identify several key change points, however, and for some of these periods the pattern is that 4chan and Reddit are active in advance of take-up on Twitter, and then in alternative news (by several days); such alternative news coverage also leads to further mainstream news coverage.

This points to a strongly interrelated networked digital information ecology, and this is almost certainly also related to platform characteristics.