Distrusting consensus:How a uniform corona pandemic narrative fostered suspicion and conspiracy theories

Although the institutional model of science communication operated well during the corona-pandemic, and relevant public institutions (media, science, politics)garnered higher levels of trust following “rally-around-the-flag” dynamics, other people would developdistruststowards those institutionsand the emerging orthodox corona narrative. Theirideasare often framed as conspiracy theories, and today’s globalized media eco-system enables their proliferation. This looming “infodemic” became a prime object of concern.In this article I agnostically study those distrusts from a cultural sociological perspective to better understand how and why people (came to) disbelieve official knowledge and their producers. To do so, I draw on my ethnographic fieldwork in the off-and online worlds of people labeled as conspiracy theorists in the Netherlands, which includes the media they consume, share and produce. Based on an inductive analysis of people’s own sense-making, I present three dominant reasons: media’s panicky narrative of fear and mayhem; governments sole focus on lockdowns and vaccines; and the exclusion of heterodox scientific perspectives in the public sphere. Each of these reasons problematize a perceived orthodoxy in media, politics and science, and this uniformity bred suspicion about possible conspiracies between these public institutions. Too much consensus gets distrusted. While we candiscard those ideas as irrational conspiracy theories, I conclude that these findings have important implications for the way we deal with and communicate about complex societal problems. Next to keeping things simple and clear, as crisis/risk/science communication holds, we need to allow for uncertainty, critique and epistemic diversity as wel

Against modernist illusions: why we need more democratic and constructivist alternatives to debunking conspiracy theories

Various societal and academic actors argue that conspiracy theories should be debunked by insisting on the truthfulness of real “facts” provided by established epistemic institutions. But are academic scholars the appropriate actors to correct people’s beliefs and is that the right and most productive thing to do? Drawing on years of ethnographic research experiences in the Dutch conspiracy milieu, I explain in this paper why debunking conspiracy theories is not possible (can scholars actually know the real truth?), not professional (is taking sides in truth wars what we should do?), and not productive (providing more “correct” information won’t work as knowledge acceptance is not just a cognitive/epistemic issue). Instead of reinstalling the modernist legitimation narrative of science, I argue in this paper for an alternative that is both epistemologically stronger and sociologically more effective. Building from research and experiments with epistemic democracy in the field of science and technology studies, I propose to have “deliberative citizen knowledge platforms”, instead of elite experts groups alone, asses the quality of public information. Such societally representative bodies should enjoy more legitimacy and epistemic diversity to better deal with conspiracy theories and the broader societal conflicts over truth and knowledge they represent

From the unbelievable to the undeniable: Epistemological pluralism, or how conspiracy theorists legitimate their extraordinary truth claims

Despite their stigma, conspiracy theories are hugely popular today and have pervaded mainstream culture. Increasingly, such theories expanded into large master schemes of deceit where ‘everything is connected’. Moving beyond discussions of their truthfulness, we study in this article how such ‘super conspiracy theories’ are made plausible. We strategically selected the case study of David Icke – a true celebrity in conspiracy circles and main proponent of such all-encompassing narratives – to analyze his discursive strategies of legitimation: How does he support and validate his extraordinary claims? It is our argument that Icke succeeds by exploiting multiple sources of epistemic authority; he draws eclectically on ‘experience’, ‘tradition’, ‘futuristic imageries’, ‘science’ and ‘social theory’ to convince his audience. In a Western culture without any full monopoly on truth, and for a people wary of mainstream authorities, it proves opportune to draw on a wide variety of epistemic sources when claiming knowledge

The Corona Truth Wars:Epistemic Disputes and Societal Conflicts around a Pandemic—An Introduction to the Special Issue

Ever since the start of the Corona pandemic, different and often conflicting views have emerged about the virus and how to appropriately deal with it. Such epistemic, societal, and economic criticisms, including those about government imposed measures, have often been dismissed as dangerous forms of conspiratorial disinformation that should be (and have been) excluded from the realm of reasonable political discussion. However, since these critiques of emerging hegemonic knowledge and policies often involve significant and complex questioning of epistemic and political claims, and since corresponding plausibilities change over time, such clear distinctions between correct knowledge and foolish, fraudulent, and/or dangerous, disinformation are not easy to draw. In fact, they can be considered political acts in these epistemic disputes over the pandemic. These conflicts, which we refer to as the “Corona Truth Wars,” are not just about knowledge, but have turned into societal conflicts and even outright identity wars that run through families, circles of friends, organizations, and entire societies. In this special issue, we illuminate these dynamics by bringing together a range of scholars who have been struck by the complexity of these controversies and their far-reaching social consequences. Far from understanding these controversies as simple dichotomies between truth and disinformation, or between disinterested science and manipulative politics, these scholars are interested in the various ways in which these dimensions are intertwined. Building on a long tradition of exploring (scientific) knowledge controversies, the six contributions to this special issue show how epistemic struggles over truth are not only fought in the realm of science, but increasingly manifest and interact in everyday politics, social media platforms, daily talk shows, and family dinners. The scholars brought together in this issue, with diverse disciplinary backgrounds and from different geographical regions (Denmark, France, Germany, the Czech Republic, and Israel), present their studies on the various epistemic and social conflicts that have emerged during the Corona pandemic of the last three years.</p

Explanations of news personalisation across countries and media types

News outlets worldwide increasingly adopt user- and system-driven personalisation to individualise their news delivery. Yet, the technical implementation of news personalisation systems, in particular the one relying on algorithmic news recommenders (ANRs) and tailoring individual news suggestions with the help of user data, often remains opaque. In our article, we examine how news personalisation is used by quality and popular media in three countries with different media accountability infrastructures - Brazil, the Netherlands, and Russia - and investigate how information about personalisation usage is communicated to the news readers via privacy policies. Our findings point out that news personalisation systems are predominantly treated as black boxes that indicate a significant gap between practice and theory of algorithmic transparency, in particular in the non-EU context

Democratizing algorithmic news recommenders: how to materialize voice in a technologically saturated media ecosystem

The deployment of various forms of AI, most notably of machine learning algorithms, radically transforms many domains of social life. In this paper we focus on the news industry, where different algorithms are used to customize news offerings to increasingly specific audience preferences. While this personalization of news enables media organizations to be more receptive to their audience, it can be questioned whether current deployments of algorithmic news recommenders (ANR) live up to their emancipatory promise. Like in various other domains, people have little knowledge of what personal data is used and how such algorithmic curation comes about, let alone that they have any concrete ways to influence these data-driven processes. Instead of going down the intricate avenue of trying to make ANR more transparent, we explore in this article ways to give people more influence over the information news recommendation algorithms provide by thinking about and enabling possibilities to express voice. After differentiating four ideal typical modalities of expressing voice (alternation, awareness, adjustment and obfuscation) which are illustrated with currently existing empirical examples, we present and argue for algorithmic recommender personae as a way for people to take more control over the algorithms that curate people's news provision