TY - GEN
T1 - Mapping the Narrative Ecosystem of Conspiracy Theories in Online Anti-vaccination Discussions
AU - Introne, Joshua
AU - Korsunska, Ania
AU - Krsova, Leni
AU - Zhang, Zefeng
N1 - Funding Information:
This research is supported by the National Science Foundation under grant no.1908407. We thank Sehrish Ahmed, Jingxian Sun, Zimo Xu, Yankun Wang and Mingkang Zhang for their help with coding and data scraping. We also thank our reviewers for their valuable comments.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 ACM.
PY - 2020/7/22
Y1 - 2020/7/22
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - Conspiracy Theories
KW - Misinformation
KW - Narratives
KW - Social Media
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85088092682&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85088092682&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3400806.3400828
DO - 10.1145/3400806.3400828
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85088092682
T3 - ACM International Conference Proceeding Series
SP - 184
EP - 192
BT - 11th International Conference on Social Media and Society
A2 - Gruzd, Anatoliy
A2 - Mai, Philip
A2 - Recuero, Raquel
A2 - Hernandez-Garcia, Angel
A2 - Sian Lee, Chei
A2 - Cook, James
A2 - Hodson, Jaigris
A2 - McEwan, Bree
A2 - Hopke, Jill
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
T2 - 11th International Conference on Social Media and Society: Diverse Voices - Promises and Perils of Social Media for Diversity, SMSociety 2020
Y2 - 22 July 2020 through 24 July 2020
ER -