Abstract
Conspiracy theories are a ubiquitous phenomenon in the socio-political discussion. By trusting these theories, society justifies possible events like the COVID-19 pandemic. Through mixed methods research, the article seeks to provide the amount of page-generated and user-generated conspiratorial content that links chemtrails with the COVID-19 pandemic, along with audience-generated feedback on social media content. Facebook and Reddit have been chosen for this research because of their inherently contrasting approaches to content regulation. Facebook’s content moderation tools lacked the impact to remove misinformation, as only 8% of content was flagged as false information. Additionally, even if researched subreddits had two times the amount of relevant content in comparison to relevant Facebook pages, most of the content had 0 upvotes, meaning that the content was either negatively received or lacked adequate support. Serbian-speaking Facebook users expressed support for conspiratorial content on this platform, while Serbian redditors used conspiratorial narratives to ridicule conspiracy theorists. Likes were the most utilized type of feedback on content of relevant Facebook pages, while comments were the most utilized type of feedback on content of relevant subreddits. The importance of this research lies in understanding what conspiratorial narratives try to imply through social media and how the audience interprets and communicates with this content. Keywords: conspiracy theories, social media, chemtrails, pandemic, COVID-19
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