Deceptive communication and misinformation are crucial issues that are currently having a significant impact on social life. Parallel to the important work of identifying misinformation on digital platforms is understanding why such material proliferates. One approach to answering this question is to attempt to understand the values that are being targeted by misinformation as a means of interpreting the underlying social bonds that are at stake. This study examines the kinds of social bonds that are communed around and contested in a corpus of YouTube video comments about the viral internet hoax ‘The Momo Challenge’. A social semiotic approach to ‘ambient affiliation’ (Zappavigna, 2011) is used to investigate how these bonds are negotiated in this digital discourse. This approach involves establishing the types of personae (for instance Moralisers, Myth Spreaders and Connoisseurs) who were negotiating meaning in the comments on the basis of the values that they recurrently shared, deferred or disputed. The analysis suggests that, in addition to concern over whether Momo was real and dangerous, there was a deeper moral panic about parenting in the digital age and the legitimacy of institutions such as schools and media as brokers of knowledge.

Misinformation and hate speech are prevalent issues in social media research, as well as the rise of far-right extremists, white supremacists, and conspiracy theorists. In response to these concerns about unethical behavior on social media, this article explores how underlying social bonds proposed by conspiracists are discursively negotiated in YouTube comments. Through close qualitative analysis of a corpus of comments about the Notre Dame Cathedral fire, a target of xenophobic and conspiratorial claims, the study identifies the range of recurrent textual personae who respond to the conspiracy theories in the videos. The analytical focus is on the values these personae express and the discursive legitimation strategies used to strengthen their claims. This article is methodologically grounded in a social semiotic approach. Seven textual personae are identified in the dataset that each realizes a particular patterning of social bonds and legitimation strategies, for example, “Educators” legitimated the authority of experts and explained why content was false, while “White Supremacists” and “Inciters” sanctioned technology and negatively evaluated particular social groups. The method employed identifies the attitudinal positions and legitimation strategies that are at the heart of the various ideologies underlying conspiracy theories. It is a step toward developing approaches for combating misinformation and hate speech that are targeted at the key values of specific communities, and avoid overgeneralizing the motivations to produce and consume conspiratorial discourse. This approach is important since arguing logical points alone, without considering the key bonds people share, is unlikely to help in combating conspiratorial discourses.

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