Veiled conspiracism: Particularities and convergence in the styles and functions of conspiracy-related communication across digital platforms

Abstract

Digital communication venues are essential infrastructures for anti-democratic actors to spread harmful content such as conspiracy theories. Capitalizing on platform affordances, they leverage conspiracy theories to mainstream their political views in broader public discourse. We compared the word choice, language style, and communicative function of conspiracy-related content to understand its platform-dependent differences and convergence. Our cases are the conspiracy theories of the New World Order and Great Replacement, which we analyzed on 4chan/pol/, Twitter, and seven alternative US news media longitudinally from 2011 to 2021. The conspiracy-related texts were comparatively analyzed using a multi-method approach of computational and quantitative text analyses. Our results show that conspiracy narrations are increasingly present in all venues. While language differs vastly between platforms, we observed a style convergence between Twitter and 4chan. The results show how more coded language veils the spread of racist and antisemitic content beyond the so-called dark platforms.