Infodemia: Concept, Social and Political Consequences, Methods of Managing

The article is devoted to the consideration of the infodemia phenomenon as a result of massive fakes injections associated with the 2019-nCoV pandemic. Author analyzes the global social and political consequences of disinformation in social networks and messengers on the topic of health, official health statistics and government methods to combat the spread of the virus. There is a decrease in trust to government authorities and official information sources and also an increase in the popularity of conspiracy narratives. Author identifies methods to deal with infodemia and analyzes their effectiveness.

Deplatforming, demotion and folk theories of Big Tech persecution

This article examines the moderation of conspiracy narratives surrounding COVID-19 through digital methods analysis of deplatformed or demoted videos. Building upon the literature on moderation, it performs a comparison of the types of content moderated by YouTube during the early stages of the pandemic. It seeks to determine the extent to which YouTube's own moderation actions are brought in as part of the conspiratorial narratives surrounding COVID-19, while investigating how it is that moderation becomes entangled with questions of truth and visibility.

Of Power and Peril

This chapter provides an explanatory framework for why regimes promote conspiracy claims, based on the insight that because conspiracy theories are theories about power, it makes sense to foreground politics—the opportunities and constraints facing politicians as they consider what stories to tell about the world. It conceptualizes conspiracy theories as a form of propaganda and summarizes theories about conspiracism in politics. The author argues that claiming conspiracy can signal knowledge and prescience, and details three factors associated with the production and circulation of conspiracy claims: destabilizing events, political competition, and cross-border connections and alignments. Regimes may use conspiracy claims intermittently or may construct broad conspiracy narratives and strategically disseminate them over time, but there are potential hazards for regimes that rely excessively on conspiracism. Finally, the chapter outlines the features of three conspiratorial modes: sporadic official conspiracism, competitive conspiracism, and sustained official conspiracism.

The Emergence and Ascendancy of Conspiracism in Russia

This chapter explains Russia’s transformation from a regime of competitive conspiracism to one of sustained official conspiracism. It demonstrates that Russia’s leaders adopted conspiratorial rhetoric reactively and intermittently, in response to politically resonant events. It took a series of critical setbacks in 2004 and 2005—threats to sovereignty, challenges to Putin’s narrative about rebuilding Russia, and deteriorating relations with the West—to cause the shift. It analyzes four events that took place under differing circumstances and that correspond to relative peaks and valleys of conspiracism: the 1996 presidential election, the 2004 terrorist attack in Beslan, the 2005 anti-privatization protests, and the 2014 Euromaidan protests. Examining conspiracy claims in context reveals that Kremlin officials initially selectively embraced the conspiracy narratives of nationalist pundits and intellectuals. Later, the Kremlin adopted a strategy of sustained conspiracism to proactively frame those threats, a practice that became all-consuming by 2014.

Medical disinformation and the unviable nature of COVID-19 conspiracy theories

The coronavirus pandemic has seen a marked rise in medical disinformation across social media. A variety of claims have garnered considerable traction, including the assertion that COVID is a hoax or deliberately manufactured, that 5G frequency radiation causes coronavirus, and that the pandemic is a ruse by big pharmaceutical companies to profiteer off a vaccine. An estimated 30% of some populations subscribe some form of COVID medico-scientific conspiracy narratives, with detrimental impacts for themselves and others. Consequently, exposing the lack of veracity of these claims is of considerable importance. Previous work has demonstrated that historical medical and scientific conspiracies are highly unlikely to be sustainable. In this article, an expanded model for a hypothetical en masse COVID conspiracy is derived. Analysis suggests that even under ideal circumstances for conspirators, commonly encountered conspiratorial claims are highly unlikely to endure, and would quickly be exposed. This work also explores the spectrum of medico-scientific acceptance, motivations behind propagation of falsehoods, and the urgent need for the medical and scientific community to anticipate and counter the emergence of falsehoods.