Focussing on the Community Aspects of Conspiracist Communities

The final speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Alma Kalisky, whose focus is on ‘flat earther’ conspiracist communities. Overall, conspiracist beliefs can have significant negative consequences at the personal, social, and societal level, but also provide a ground for community formation and social connection; at the individual and communal level, we must better understand what attracts people to these conspiracy communities.

Conspiracy believers often come from low socioeconomic backgrounds, have low interpersonal and political trust, and are often perceived as paranoid and dangerous; the emotional belonging that they experience is much less understood: conspiracy groups are communities for marginalised and stigmatised individuals that engage in constant boundary work which aims to delineate between authentic community members and outsiders.

Alma focusses here on a public Israeli flat earther Facebook group which has some 9,000 members and features new posts every day; she examined this between January and May 2023 and gathered some 15 key posts and 1015 comments for detailed analysis that contained keywords relating to the community’s identity.

She found three major themes in these posts. The first of these was managing the group’s norms of behaviour: members showed appreciation for the posts of others, and expressed solidarity with the thoughts, opinions, and experiences of others. The second discussed criteria for ‘good’ participation in the group: this emphasised openmindedness (but only to new ideas that support flat-earth theories), expressed respect for other members and their contributions, and equated flat eartherism with faith in god, as opposed connecting an acceptance of round-earth reality with atheism. The third was a discussion about whether or not to actively recruit new members to the group: some voices argued for an evangelist approach aimed at convincing others of flat-earth theories, while others were favour of strict boundary controls that maintained the exclusivity of community membership.

Overall, then, only those who subscribe to these values and beliefs are seen as worthy of community membership, and this makes a clear distinction between group members and outsiders, and thereby enhances the value of group membership for those who meet these criteria.