Abstract
The pandemic has accelerated the pervasiveness of social media as tools to obviate, in times of forced distancing, the need for social relations. As Deborah Lupton notes, digital media played a much more important role in the COVID-19 phase than in the 1990s and the HIV/AIDS emergency; however they have also contributed to the spread of misinformation and fake news, often characterized by conspiracy-type narratives The investigation, carried out in line with the Digital Methods approach, analyses how a popular conspiracy theory on Twitter - the flat Earth theory – activates and reinforces the spread of other intertwined conspiracies by exploiting some popular hashtags used as popularity multipliers. The essay analyses the role of Twitter in reinforcing informational cascades related to multiple conspiracies such as the flat Earth, the COVID-19 /5G and the no-vax theories. Moreover, the analysed contents reveal a significant polarisation identified by hate content and an aggressive lexicon used both by conspiracy supporters and by those who tend to contrast them.
Highlights
The pandemic has accelerated the pervasiveness of social media as ideal environments to obviate the need for relationships in times of forced distancing: as Deborah Lupton observes, in the COVID-19 phase digital media played a very important role compared to the 90s and the HIV / AIDS emergency; they enabled the enormous spread of false news often characterized by conspiracy-type narratives
The analysis tries to demonstrate the synergistic relationship between different conspiracy contents on Twitter, investigating the combined use of popular hashtags such as that of flat Earth and those related to COVID-19, the anti-vax movement and deniers of the pandemic
The data analysed cannot reveal significant informational cascades, they highlight the ambiguous relationships between multiple conspiracies fueling a conspiracy cluster that dramatically pollutes the public sphere of social media
Summary
The pandemic has accelerated the pervasiveness of social media as ideal environments to obviate the need for relationships in times of forced distancing: as Deborah Lupton observes, in the COVID-19 phase digital media played a very important role compared to the 90s and the HIV / AIDS emergency; they enabled the enormous spread of false news often characterized by conspiracy-type narratives. Through an automatic social media contents analysis, the spread of the infodemic in conjunction with the evolution of the health emergency, identifying multiple forms of misinformation. The research of Islam et al (2020) for example, focused on three types of misinformation circulating on Facebook, Twitter, in online newspapers, including fact-checking agency websites, and which can have serious implications for public health: they are identified as rumors, contents that stigmatize individuals or institutions and conspiracy theories.
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