Rage Against the Machine: Exploring Violence and Emotion in Conspiracy Narratives on Parler

Abstract

The mainstreaming of conspiracy narratives has been associated with a rise in violent offline harms, from harassment, vandalism of communications infrastructure, assault, and in its most extreme form, terrorist attacks. Group-level emotions of anger, contempt, and disgust have been proposed as a pathway to legitimizing violence. Here, we examine expressions of anger, contempt, and disgust as well as violence, threat, hate, planning, grievance, and paranoia within various conspiracy narratives on Parler. We found significant differences between conspiracy narratives for all measures and narratives associated with higher levels of offline violence showing greater levels of expression.