Conspiracy Networks in American Culture (original) (raw)

Networks of Terror: Theoretical Assumptions and Pragmatic Consequences

Communication Theory, 2007

Very little has been written in scholarly or popular venues on the conceptualization and utilization of the term network to describe terrorist organizing. In this paper, we identify critical disjunctures between the assumptions of contemporary communication network theory and the assumptions and appropriation of network concepts by the current U.S. Administration in discussions of terrorism networks. We argue that the theoretical and empirical foundations of contemporary network research provide a more complex and constructive platform from which policy makers may ask better questions and find better solutions.

Plotting Future Directions in Conspiracy Theory Research

The present volume is a testament to the growing international scholarly interest in conspiracy theory as a complex cultural, psychological, and political phenomenon. It provides a snapshot of the variety of research being done in different disciplines on a variety of regions, historical traditions, and source materials. Its central premise of exploring conspiracy theories in comparative national and historical perspective opens up many new avenues of enquiry. In this chapter, I want to place this work in the context of other recent research on conspiracy theory, and to outline five areas for future inquiry: problems of definition, comparative approaches, modes of transmission, patterns of belief, and policy implications.

Political Potentiality of Conspiracy Theories.

Lexia 24-25, 2016

The web connects like-minded people on a global scale. It widens communication possibilities for spreading ideas by overcoming socio-economical restrictions inherent to old media. Thus, Internet is often understood as a new public sphere, which helps to advance the ideals of democracy. On the other hand, its role in encouraging specific niche-communities — often accompanied by the radicalization and polarization of identification — cannot be ignored. This means that online communication allows the development of new kinds of communities, which differ from previous forms of power (publicly institutionalized). These communities are located in the gray area between the private and the public sphere. The article explains the formation of this kind of community in relation to conspiracy theories. The specifics of communication in these communities are explicated through relying on the concepts of auto-communication and anti-culture (from cultural semio-tics) and with reference to Roman Jakobson´s concepts of dominant and phatic language function.

Rethinking conspiracy theories

Synthese, 2022

I argue that that an influential strategy for understanding conspiracy theories stands in need of radical revision. According to this approach, called 'generalism', conspiracy theories are epistemically defective by their very nature. Generalists are typically opposed by particularists, who argue that conspiracy theories should be judged case-by-case, rather than definitionally indicted. Here I take a novel approach to criticizing generalism. I introduce a distinction between 'Dominant Institution Conspiracy Theories and Theorists' and 'Non-Dominant Institution Conspiracy Theories and Theorists'. Generalists uncritically center the latter in their analysis, but I show why the former must be centered by generalists' own lights: they are the clearest representatives of their views, and they are by far the most harmful. Once we make this change in paradigm cases, however, various typical generalist theses turn out to be false or in need of radical revision. Conspiracy theories are not primarily produced by extremist ideologies, as generalists typically claim, since mainstream, purportedly non-extremist political ideologies are just as, if not more responsible for such theories. Conspiracy theories are also, we find, not the province of amateurs: they are often created and pushed by individuals widely viewed as experts, who have the backing of our most prestigious intellectual institutions. While generalists may be able to take this novel distinction and shift in paradigm cases on board, this remains to be seen. Subsequent generalist accounts that do absorb this distinction and shift will look radically different from previous incarnations of the view. Analysis of the paranoid style is, itself, back in style. In recent years, there has been an enormous increase in academic and public commentary on conspiracy theories, in particular concerning the threats they pose. Here are a few sample headlines: "Stop the Online Conspiracy Theorists Before They Break Democracy" (The Guardian); "'More Dangerous And More Widespread': Conspiracy Theories Spread Faster Than Ever" (NPR); "Conspiracy Theories are Dangerous-and Here's How to Crush Them" (The Economist). Recent philosophical accounts have aimed to show that there is indeed something epistemically deficient in the very nature of conspiracy theories. Such 'generalist' philosophical views are so called because they argue that conspiracy theories, as a class, represent beliefs that are inherently epistemically flawed (Buenting and Taylor 2010). Once 'conspiracy theories' are understood in this sense, generalists then typically make the following four claims regarding conspiracy theories and theorists: 1.) Conspiracy theories are the work of amateurs. According to Quassim Cassam, "That's not a comment on their intellectual merits, but on the qualifications of the amateur sleuths and Internet detectives who push them" (2019, 23-4). This "amateurish" nature of conspiracy theories is why, by extension, they reject "officially sanctioned experts or sources of information" (96). 2.) Those who subscribe to conspiracy theories are typically political "extremists" (Sunstein and Vermeule 2009, 219). More generally, the "ideologies that are most conducive to Conspiracy Theories are extremist ideologies" (Cassam 2019, 50). 3.) Conspiracy theorists are typically not well-off socioeconomically and are less educated (Freeman and Bentall 2017; Douglas et al 2019, 10; Cassam 2019). More generally, the social and psychological science on conspiracy theories has revealed important characteristics shared among conspiracy theorists (Douglas et al 2019; Sunstein and Vermeule 2009). 4.) We should solve the problems conspiracy theories pose by: A.) Doubling down on the ways in which "[c]onspiracy theories are generally dislodged by the media and other non-governmental actors", such as sites likes snopes.com (Sunstein and Vermeule 2009, 219). B.) Government online "infiltration of extremist groups" (219). C.) Improving intellectual and moral education (Cassam 2019). In what follows, I argue that all four of these claims-despite their familiarity from both the academic literature and their popular counterparts-are false or, at the very least, in need of radical revision. Furthermore, I argue that this is so by the very lights of these philosophers' own views of conspiracy theories-by the very lights of the generalist position. My argument differs from typical objections to these views. 'Particularists', who oppose the generalists, argue that we have plenty of examples of conspiracies obtaining historically and

Why We Should Be Suspicious of Conspiracy Theories: A Novel Demarcation Problem

Episteme

What, if anything, is wrong with conspiracy theories (CTs)? A conspiracy refers to a group of people acting in secret to achieve some nefarious goal. Given that the pages of history are full of such plots, however, why are CTs often regarded with suspicion and even disdain? According to “particularism,” the currently dominant view among philosophers, each CT should be evaluated on its own merits and the negative reputation of CTs as a class is wholly undeserved. In this paper, I defend a moderate version of “generalism,” the view that there is indeed something prima facie suspicious about CTs, properly defined, and that they suffer from common epistemic defects. To demarcate legitimate theorizing about real-life conspiracies from “mere conspiracy theories” (in the pejorative sense), I draw on a deep asymmetry between causes and effects in the natural world. Because of their extreme resilience to counterevidence, CTs can be seen as the epistemological equivalent of black holes, in wh...

Network Analysis of Conspiracy Theories and Pseudosciences

Conspiracy theories (including those related to secret societies) and pseudo-sciences (CT&PS) are as old as the humankind. The abundance of CT&PS surviving in the modern world is astonishing: Wikipedia [Wik16a] mentions 200 categories of conspiracy theories and secret societies, and ca. 150 topics classified as pseudoscience [Wik16b]. The goal of our project is to quantify relationships among these topics, on one hand, and between these topics and other, non-conspiratorial and non-pseudo-scientific, topics, on the other hand. We use title and co-purchasing information from Amazon.com—a new source of cheap and relatively easily collectible research data [RW14]. The dataset consists of 101,000 distinct titles, mostly referring to books and collected in August–December 2016 by starting with a manually selected collection of seed titles and following the links to 4–10 titles that are frequently purchased together. About 9,500 titles in the dataset are related to CT&PS. We manually assigned each CT&PS title to at least one of the 360 categories from the Wikipedia lists [Wik16a, Wik16b]. (We plan to use these tagged titles in the future in machine learning-based classification projects.) We arranged the categories into a network, where two categories are connected if the titles in these categories are frequently purchased together (as reported by Amazon.com). Since Amazon.com shows only the first few related items, our network is sparser than the real latent co-purchase network. The resultant network consists of 267 categories and 99 connected components. 93 categories were not included because there had few or no titles in them. Most components have 4 or fewer categories (e.g., " zang fu–meridian therapy–cupping therapy–moxibustion " or " big government "), but the largest connected component—the giant component—has 152 (57%) categories. We hypothesize that the small isolated components represent distinct CT&PS topics—bags of categories that describe purchase baskets of customers interested in the field. However, the same reasoning cannot be extended to the giant component. We used louvain network community detection algorithm [BGLL08] to partition the giant component into 15 modular communities—sets of nodes that have more connections among them than to the other sets. We hypothesize that each community is yet another form of a distinct CT&PS topic.