Convoy, coalition, and conspiracy: Finding common cause in anti-vaxxer movements

Abstract

In this article, we evaluate the online identity building processes that can lead the members of alternative health communities and conspiritualists to embrace positions occupied by the far Right. First, we present the findings of a data scraping and visualization project, drawn primarily from then-Twitter over the first six months of 2022, a period that includes January and February when the Canadian capital Ottawa was occupied by the so-called Freedom Convoy. Drawing on a selective corpus of over 25,000 tweets sourced via seed keywords, our research connects parallel pathways that lead from different starting points to similar end positions–points of no return where new alliances are formed. Second, we conduct a visual content analysis of a series of ten Instagram accounts hosted by female conspiritualists. In our analysis of 400 images, drawn from accounts of a range of influencers in Canada and the United States with roughly 5,000–500,000 followers, we seek to uncover what the visual content created by these influencers reveals about the online wellness-to-conspiracy pipeline. Taken in sum and in relation to cognate studies elsewhere, these two case studies help to illuminate the susceptibility of conspiritualists to the rhetoric and agendas of the far Right.