Scroll Top

Deep State Phobia. Narrative Convergence in Coronavirus Conspiracism on Instagram.

coronavirus-covid-19-cell-covid-covid19-pandemic-2021-08-29-21-02-55-utc

Recent scholarship has established that conspiracist narratives proliferated in mainstream online discourse during the coronavirus pandemic. This proliferation has been provocatively characterized as a ‘conspiracy singularity’ in which previously divergent conspiracy narratives converged into a single, overarching narrative. Yet while the idea of narrative convergence has long figured in conspiracy theory research, empirical evidence has been scarce. The present article aims to address this gap by means of an investigation of an archive containing over 470,000 conspiracy-related Instagram posts from 2020. Read more