Social Semiotics of Gangstalking Evidence Videos on YouTube: Multimodal Discourse Analysis of a Novel Persecutory Belief System (Preprint)
BACKGROUND Gangstalking refers to a novel persecutory belief system wherein sufferers believe that they are being followed, watched, and harassed by a vast network of people in their community who have been recruited as complicit perpetrators. They are frequently diagnosed as mentally ill, though they vehemently reject this formulation. Those affected by this belief system self-identify as targeted individuals. Targeted individuals seek to prove the veracity of their persecution and dispute the notion that they are mentally ill by posting videos online that purport to provide definitive evidence to substantiate their claims of harassment. OBJECTIVE The objective of the study was to characterize the multimodal social semiotic practices employed in gangstalking evidence videos. METHODS We assembled a group of 50 evidence videos posted on YouTube by self-identified targeted individuals. We performed a multimodal discourse analysis on a corpus of 50 YouTube vlogs. We employed a grounded theory approach to data analysis. RESULTS Targeted individuals accomplished several social and interpersonal tasks in the videos. They constructed their own identity as subjects of persecution and refuted the notion that they suffered from mental illness. They also cultivated positive ambient affiliation with viewers of the videos but manifested hostility to people who appeared in the videos. They made extensive use of multimodal deixis to generate salience and construe the gangstalking belief system. The act of filming itself was a source of conflict and served as a self-fulfilling prophecy; filming was undertaken to neutrally record hostility directed towards vloggers. However, the act of filming precipitated the very behaviours that they set out to document. Finally, the act of filming was also regarded as an act of resistance and empowerment by vloggers. CONCLUSIONS This data provides valuable insights into the social and linguistics construction of a novel persecutory belief system. The data is collected in a naturalistic setting and is not influenced by interviewers or clinicians, which may influence the disclosures of those affected in clinical settings. It demonstrated that interpersonal concerns figured prominently for those affected by this belief system and they constructed various subjects as either sympathetic or hostile. They created positive ambient affiliation with viewers of the videos. This study found that vloggers used multimodal deixis to construct the salience of the gangstalking belief system. The videos also highlighted the Derridean concept of differance, wherein meaning of polysemous signifiers is deferred without definitive resolution. This may have important clinical ramification in communicating with people and patients suffering from persecutory belief systems. Clinicians working with adherents to persecutory belief systems may consider stepping away from the traditional true/false dichotomy historically endorsed by psychiatric classification systems and focus on the fundamental ambiguity inherent in semiotic systems generally and in persecutory belief systems specifically.