REDACT: Researching Europe, Digitalisation and Conspiracy Theories

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REDACT: Researching Europe, Digitalisation and Conspiracy Theories

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Digital communication technologies enable the exchange, adaptation, and adoption of conspiracy theories at an unprecedented speed and scale, facilitating the creation of counter-publics connected by a propensity for mis- and disinformation.

The REDACT project will analyse how digitalisation shapes the form, content, and consequences of conspiracy theories, including online sociality and offline actions and effects. Rather than see digitalisation as a process that has universal outcomes, or conspiracy theories as the same over space and time, REDACT considers online conspiracy theories and counter-publics in different European regions (Western Europe, Central Europe, the Baltics, and the Balkans) in order to make robust and nuanced recommendations about conspiracy theories—a particularly durable form of mis- and disinformation—for policy makers, media regulators, fact-checking and extremism-monitoring organisations, as well as the internet companies themselves.

This project aims to understand the impact of digitalisation on the production, consumption, circulation and regulation of conspiracy theories across Europe.

It will take on board how both the conditions of digitised mediation and political, social and historical contexts shape the content, communities, consequences of and responses to online conspiracy theories today.

REDACT will employ a comparative and interdisciplinary framework that combines digital methods, ethnography, and granular cultural and political discourse analysis to examine the actors, tactics, cultural forms, technologies and audiences involved in the online spread of conspiracy theories in different European regions as well as the tactics that have been developed to combat them.

By working with regional and EU-level fact-checking and disinformation-monitoring organisations as Co-operation Partners, the ultimate goal of the research is to make locally relevant recommendations for these organisations, policy makers, media regulators as well as for the internet companies themselves.

The project's main objectives are:

To ascertain which platforms and actors are the key online disseminators of conspiracy theories in a region or country and to understand which alternative platforms conspiracy actors and communities migrate to if deplatformed.
To analyse forms of online sociality created around conspiracy postings and spaces; ascertain how users develop communities and how platform affordances shape them; and understand how identity and belonging impact the discourse of these spaces.
To analyse the dominant (visual and narrative) aesthetic modes of digital conspiracy theories in these regions.
To map out the relationship between imported and local conspiracy theories.
To account for how regional histories and conditions (including histories of the acceptance of conspiracy theories, experiences of authoritarianism and conflict, histories of freedom of speech and press freedoms, propaganda, or corruption etc.) shape the production and consumption of online conspiracy theories.
To investigate if and under what conditions online conspiracism translates into offline mobilisation.
To analyse how cross-European and local organisations attempt to combat online conspiracy theories and understand the assumptions about conspiracy theories that drive those interventions; and, on the basis of these analyses, to develop general and regionally-specific recommendations for tackling conspiracy theories in collaboration with partner organisations.

This project aims to understand the impact of digitalisation on the production, consumption, circulation and regulation of conspiracy theories across Europe.

The project's main objectives are:

To ascertain which platforms and actors are the key online disseminators of conspiracy theories in a region or country and to understand which alternative platforms conspiracy actors and communities migrate to if deplatformed.
To analyse forms of online sociality created around conspiracy postings and spaces; ascertain how users develop communities and how platform affordances shape them; and understand how identity and belonging impact the discourse of these spaces.
To analyse the dominant (visual and narrative) aesthetic modes of digital conspiracy theories in these regions.
To map out the relationship between imported and local conspiracy theories.
To account for how regional histories and conditions (including histories of the acceptance of conspiracy theories, experiences of authoritarianism and conflict, histories of freedom of speech and press freedoms, propaganda, or corruption etc.) shape the production and consumption of online conspiracy theories.
To investigate if and under what conditions online conspiracism translates into offline mobilisation.
To analyse how cross-European and local organisations attempt to combat online conspiracy theories and understand the assumptions about conspiracy theories that drive those interventions; and, on the basis of these analyses, to develop general and regionally-specific recommendations for tackling conspiracy theories in collaboration with partner organisations.