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1 Conspiracy theories, the evolution of communication and the contemporary global media environment
Conspiracy theories are a recurrent feature of politics, and have evolved over centuries alongside developments in communication and political rhetoric. In Ancient Athens, conspiracy accusations were used to control society, by reminding citizens of the need to be accountable to the republic (Roisman, 2006). In Ancient Rome, conspiracy rhetoric was used both to destroy opponentsā reputations and to help explain political events that were otherwise hard to account for rationally (Pagan, 2012). Crucially, in both societies, there was some capacity for political leaders to be challenged by their opponents for their actions, and conspiracy theories worked as a political tool to help manage public politics. In the late Middle Ages conspiracy theories re-emerged as a by-product of early European political developments, such as how Italian establishment powerbrokers analysed information from numerous ā often anonymous ā sources to make decisions about the security of their states (Zwierlein and de Graaf, 2013). Later, this style of thinking spread across the European societies that were gradually becoming divided along religious lines. The key to the proliferation of conspiracy theories in modern Europe, then, for the first time since Antiquity, was the amount of news communication produced and received across the European continent (Zwierlein, 2020, p. 546). Making sense of the political sphere became important to princes, office holders and intellectuals alike, whilst the threat of censorship increased the anonymity of this communication.
The Age of Enlightenment turned conspiracy theories into a major cognitive instrument to comprehend the rapidly changing reality. In just a couple of years, networks of intellectuals in Britain, Europe, Russia and the US were vital in spreading the first global conspiracy theory about an āIlluminatiā secret society (Porter, 2005). From the onset of the American republic, populist movements instrumentalised anti-Illuminati and later anti-immigrant fears, turning conspiracy theories into tools of social mobilisation (Davis, 1960; Hofstadter, 1965). In Europe, conservatives quickly merged anti-Illuminati and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, as with the late 19th-century āletter of Simoniniā hoax, which claimed that the Jews stood behind the Masonic lodges and were responsible for the waves of European revolutions (Oberhauser, 2020). Jews became seen as a problematic āOtherā whose place amongst the newly forming nations was unstable and even threatening (Bartal, 2005).
Shortly afterwards, Russian counterintelligence officers produced a faked document, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Hagemeister, 2008). Its premise was that of a secret meeting of Jewish elders from around the world, scheming to achieve future political and financial omnipotence. The scale and velocity with which this hoax spread globally in the first decades of the 20th century ā and its enduring relevance today ā reveal much about the frustrations shared in Russia, Germany and America about rapidly changing life, and the appetite for scapegoats. Both the narrative and the visual elements of The Protocols helped channel hatred towards real Jewish communities (Gray, 2010) and even imagined ones (Swami, 2012).
Marshall McLuhanās famous concept āthe medium is the messageā (1964) explains how the evolution of the media in their relation to human senses has impacted upon conspiratorial narratives and their means of circulation in the last couple of centuries (Aupers et al., 2020). Where printed stories have helped to make conspiracy a popular way of explaining reality, visual representations of conspiracy have captivated mass audiences, especially during political and financial crises. Anti-Semitic tropes developed from late 19th-century Nazi propaganda featuring the eternal Jew, to 20th-century conspiratorial cartoons and film, all the way up to early 21st-century memes and GIFs. On the other hand, the Cold War offered an opportunity for the conspiracy cultures that had flourished for centuries in the US (Goldberg, 2001), Europe (Onnerfors and Krouwel, 2021) and Russia (Yablokov, 2018) to come to the fore as a transnational political tool. In fact, there are few differences between the nature of Stalinist propaganda against capitalists and the McCarthyite Red-baiting of the 1950s. However, the espionage-focussed mentality of the Cold War turned conspiracy theories into a legitimate style of cultural and political story-telling (Thalmann, 2019) that continues to permeate the politics of the US and Russia to this day (Denvir, 2018; Yablokov, 2018). Clearly, the visual and narrative culture of conspiracy theories can adapt to fit the prevailing media context (Caumanns and Onnerfors, 2020). In this respect, the current period is particularly significant, because of individualsā ability to āprosumeā (Ritzer and Jurgenson, 2010): to consume and produce their very own conspiratorial readings of the balance of power underlying world events (Aupers, 2012).
Conspiracy theories and the logics of the contemporary global media environment
Conspiracy theories spread rapidly in a contemporary global media environment in which over half of the global population uses the internet, and in developed countries, regular use is the norm (85% of EU adults; 91% of UK adults) (ITU, 2018; ONS, 2018). News and information can now be āprosumedā instantaneously, right when trust in established institutions is seeing a long-term fall and people are more open to trusting alternative figureheads who better reflect their own personal perspectives (Coleman, 2018, p. 1). All media institutions have had to adapt to this context, with many attempting to maximise and monetise online consumption through āclickbaitā (Moore, 2018; Chatterje-Doody and Crilley, 2019a). Such trends also help to explain how marginal actors and discourse can come to influence the agendas of others ā especially given that conservative news websites are more likely than liberal ones to propagate fabricated stories, and conservative individuals are more likely to believe them. Liberal media outlets, on the other hand, are the ones more likely to change their agenda in response (Vargo et al., 2018).
At the same time, the increased personalisation of news allows media users to actively curate and contribute to the information they consume. Production, dissemination and reception of news are now intimately intertwined (Chadwick, 2017), and users contribute to feedback loops that shape the media-politics relationship (Zannettou et al., 2017). Just as social media users are more trusting of the opinions and recommendations of their contacts (Turcotte et al., 2015; Rosenthal and Brito, 2017, p. 382), so too mainstream news coverage cites social media commentary and trends as examples of public opinion (Chatterje-Doody and Crilley, 2019a, p. 84). This gives online minorities the opportunity to influence offline news agendas.
With established systems of generating knowledge and trust in crisis, many people doubt that political elites and the mainstream media represent their true interests. The current media environment increases their access to alternative interpretations of current events that ring more true to them (Davies, 2018). So, truth becomes de-linked from analysis of public records, debate and consensus-building. Instead, credibility attaches itself to the ānew type of heroic truth tellerā who is ābrave enough to call bullshit on the rest of the establishmentā (Davies, 2018).
Various political and media actors have positioned themselves as precisely such heroic truth tellers, often whilst explicitly criticising the āestablishmentā. They include whistle-blowers like Edward Snowden, independent publishers like WikiLeaks, alternative news outlets (whether domestic or international) that promote these kinds of stories, and individuals who build their profile by commenting on them. This division of the public space into a noble people set against a corrupt elite is a classic feature of populist logic. These populist logics of communication work with the dynamics of the contemporary global media environment in ways that define conspiracy theories in the present age.
The linked logics of populism and conspiracy theories
Populism has been referred to as a āthin-centred ideologyā that political actors can map onto any specific ideological concerns they have, from either end of the political spectrum (Mudde and Kaltwasser, 2017). In practical terms, though, populism often involves exploiting particular issue politics at times of real or perceived crisis and societal dissatisfaction (Canovan, 1999). For this reason, several scholars look at populism in terms of what it actually does ā i.e. as āa political logicā (Laclau, 2005), a āstyleā of performing and thus enacting social relations (Moffit and Tormey, 2014) or, most recently, as a ācommunication logicā which incorporates an actorās claims, motives and methods of engagement (Engesser et al., 2017).
Broadly speaking, populist appeals tend to mobilise āthe peopleā against power-holding āelitesā who are depicted as corrupt, self-serving and out of touch with āordinaryā citizensā problems (Taggart, 2000; Davies, 2018, p. 220). Dominant cultural norms and styles ā like formal dress and language choices ā are often rejected in preference to ānon-eliteā forms, such as MAGA baseball caps, colloquialisms or obscene language (Canovan, 2004, p. 242; Moffitt and Tormey, 2014, p. 389; Mudde and Kaltwasser, 2017, p. 10). Conspiracy theories are structured precisely around this crucial opposition between āthe peopleā and a scheming āeliteā. They represent a populist interpretation of how power works: powerful elites serve their own interests at the expense of the public (Fenster, 2008; Yablokov, 2018). Indeed, studies have shown that openness to the populist values of peopleācentrism and antiāelitism is associated with openness to conspiracy theories (Castanho Silva et al., 2017). What is more, belief in any conspiracy theory increases openness to others, regardless of whether they fit coherently together (Goertzel, 1994; Wood et al., 2012).
Todayās rapid, accessible media environment offers people a veritable buffet of populist ideas and conspiracy theories for interpreting reality: the interaction between different media, host platforms and market logics means that journalists frequently produce content intended to appeal to the assumed preferences of intended (nonelite) audiences. Often this takes on populist characteristics, particularly in the most commercially motivated media products, and those closely based upon the vox populi (Mazzoleni et al., 2003; Bos and Brants, 2014). This is particularly notable with online media, where assumptions about preferences are not necessary ā outputs can be geared towards the kind of content that audiences actually engage with. As it happens, online audiences are more likely to share and believe fake news of a conspiratorial bent (Silverman, 2016; Silverman and Singer-Vine, 2016). What is more, conspiracy beliefs increase where news media environments foreground stories about conspiracies (Udani et al., 2018; Weeks, 2018). With the contemporary media environment defined by circulation between social and other online media (Engesser et al., 2017, p. 1280), this means that populist and conspiratorial messaging often ends up being produced through the various interactions between global media, the journalists who produce it, the platforms it is produced and circulated on, and the audiences that interact with it. This cycle gives conspiratorial online content a market advantage, and it is often packaged to engage audiencesā emotions, rather than just their reason (Chatterje-Doody and Crilley, 2019b).
In fact, peopleās understandings of the world do not rely on reason alone. Emotions shape āthe taken-for-granted assumptionsā (Fierke, 2013, p. 209), that structure peopleās thought processes, and this helps explain why conspiracy theories tend to āappeal to individuals who seek accuracy and/or meaning, but perhaps lack the cognitive tools or experience problems that prevent them from being able to find accuracy and meaning via other more rational meansā (Douglas et al, 2019, p. 8). For those individuals seeking to find news commentary that more closely matches their own perception of the world, the increasingly crowded global media marketplace offers a wealth of alternative sources on which they can draw, and which instinctively feel as though they offer a more compelling explanation of current events.
Together with the ubiquity of access to social media platforms, this makes the spread of conspiracy theories much easier. As the 2016 viral āPizzagateā conspiracy theory shows, it might take less than three months from someone alleging on Facebook that the leaders of the US Democratic Party are a part of a paedophile sex ring, to real-world violence breaking out in respon...
