Effects of Engagement with the Inconspicuous Content Shared by Conspiracist Actors

The next speaker in this ECREA 2024 session is Ernesto de León; his focus is on hyperpartisan, alternative, and conspiracy (HAC) media. These are all united by an anti-establishment dimension: they peddle misinformation that has a potential to shape public perceptions. Ernesto points here for example to a strange case of such sites promoting stories about elite sportspeople collapsing on the field; they promoted these stories as part of an anti-vaccine campaign claiming (falsely, of course) a connection between such medical cases and their vaccination with the COVID-19 vaccine.

But such content also circulates on non-HAC media sites, and through social media – and we therefore need to move our focus away from engagement with specific sources to the dissemination of particular narratives, wherever they might be found; this includes mainstream media, social media, specialist sites, etc. These inconspicuous sites are critical to people’s ‘networked exposure’ to conspiracy theories.

Building on Web tracking data from Germany that showed users’ engagement with (clicking on) HAC media content, the project identified actors who shared these links, and extracted the other links that these actors had shared; it then also examined engagement of the Web-tracked participants with this other content.

People who visited HAC media had notably more engagement with these other sites that are being promoted or weaponised by these HAC media; the more people engaged with these media, the less trust in politics and media they had; this is not true for non-HAC media users visiting these same inconspicuous sites. Use of social media in these networks further lowered media and political trust – this may point to radicalisation processes. Visiting more mainstream media shared in the context of HAC sites has the opposite effect, however – so such media may deradicalise.