Mapping the Narrative Ecosystem of Conspiracy Theories in Online Anti-vaccination Discussions

Abstract

Recent research on conspiracy theories labels conspiracism as a distinct and deficient epistemic process. However, the tendency to pathologize conspiracism obscures the fact that it is a diverse and dynamic collective sensemaking process, transacted in public on the web. Here, we adopt a narrative framework to introduce a new analytical approach for examining online conspiracism. Narrative plays an important role because it is central to human cognition as well as being domain agnostic, and so can serve as a bridge between conspiracism and other modes of knowledge production. To illustrate the utility of our approach, we use it to analyze conspiracy theories identified in conversations across three different anti-vaccination discussion forums. Our approach enables us to capture more abstract categories without hiding the underlying diversity of the raw data. We find that there are dominant narrative themes across sites, but that there is also a tremendous amount of diversity within these themes. Our initial observations raise the possibility that different communities play different roles in the collective construction of conspiracy theories online. This offers one potential route for understanding not only cross-sectional differentiation, but the longitudinal dynamics of the narrative in future work. In particular, we are interested to examine how activity within the framework of the narrative shifts in response to news events and social media platforms' nascent efforts to control different types of misinformation. Such analysis will help us to better understand how collectively constructed conspiracy narratives adapt in a shifting media ecosystem.

We love to hate George Soros: A cross-platform analysis of the Globalism conspiracy theory campaign in Brazil

“…Drawing on the observations made by Introne et al (2020) and Bessi et al (2015), we aim to interpret conspiracy theories as a way of constructing collective narrative. For the purpose of this research, we consider conspiracy theories an alternative means of knowledge production and a type of narrative-centric cognition (Introne et al, 2020).…”

“…Drawing on the observations made by Introne et al (2020) and Bessi et al (2015), we aim to interpret conspiracy theories as a way of constructing collective narrative. For the purpose of this research, we consider conspiracy theories an alternative means of knowledge production and a type of narrative-centric cognition (Introne et al, 2020). As conspiratorial narratives may never be told in full, story fragments are collectively recognized in an immanent narrative framework able to provide understanding of the current stories and the creation of additional ones (Bessi et al, 2015).…”

Forecasting Political News Engagement on Social Media

“…Other related research focuses on the personality traits of the user; e.g., Lobato et al (2020) show that individuals with personality traits high in traditionalism and low in social dominance were more willing to share misinformation about COVID-19, and a meta-analysis of COVID-19 misinformation by van Mulukom et al (2020) finds that biases, group identity, and distrust in institutions contribute to misinformation sharing. There are also investigations into how hyperpartisan news and misinformation spreads online (Haber et al 2021;Introne et al 2020), as well as possible interventions for minimizing users' engagement with such content (Bak-Coleman et al 2022;Bhuiyan et al 2021;Masrour et al 2020;Pennycook et al 2021;Aslett et al 2022;Nyhan 2021). Yet, beyond an examination of how users navigate YouTube to access more extreme content (Ribeiro et al 2020), there is little research on userlevel long-term trends in news engagement.…”

War of the Words. The Online Conversation about NATO in Romania: Communicators, Content, Communities

“…An important development would be the inclusion of a larger number of documents in the content analysis to shed further light on the content and context of the NATO mentions. A more focused look into the content of the conspiracy narratives circulated in connection to NATO -and Western countries and institutions as well -can also reveal important aspects, and there are interesting approaches and tools that can be explored to better identify nuances, as well as to illustrate and visualize results, such as the narrative analysis used by Introne et al (2018), and the narrative mapping proposed by Introne et al (2020), but also others.…”