REDACT: Researching Europe, Digitalisation, and Conspiracy Theories

The REDACT project 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. It will employ a comparative and interdisciplinary framework that combines digital methods, ethnography, and 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, 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.

In recent years, the potential for digital communication to promote cross-cultural understanding, civic engagement and scientific knowledge has increasingly been haunted by the proliferation of mis- and disinformation in the online environment. Digital conspiracy theories are a particularly pervasive, intractable and pernicious form. The rise of right-wing populist movements in many parts of the world, the coronavirus pandemic, and the war in Ukraine have made clear the possible harms that the unconstrained spread of conspiracism in the digital sphere can cause, particularly when it is linked to hate speech, anti-democratic sentiments, justifications for violence, xenophobia and racism. In short, the circulation of conspiracy theories in the online environment poses serious challenges to democracy, science, and even the very idea of objective truth. However, researchers, journalists and politicians tend to simplify the problem, and hence the potential solutions. The focus is usually on the mechanisms of the supply of conspiracy theories online rather than the reasons for the growing demand, and there has been an increasing search for automated ways of detecting and removing offending content. But research often overlooks or underestimates the lived, material conditions and political contexts that inform the development of conspiracist grievances and, therefore, the reasons why people turn to conspiracy theories and stay in conspiracist online communities once they find them. It is tempting to lay all the blame on social media. Equally, there is a tendency to assume that all conspiracy theories are merely irrational, pathological and unrooted in any facts. However, conspiracy theories very often refer to verified information, certified documents and evidence, which they then construct into narratives that are logically implausible but at the same time often highly coherent. Both tendencies can lead to inadequate responses to online conspiracy theories-viewing them merely as inaccurate information or as the result of a deficit of information.

As a (digital) humanities-based intervention, the REDACT project will examine the assumptions that inform current ways of framing and combatting online conspiracy theories. REDACT will not approach online conspiracy theories as merely a symptom of post-truth social media, nor as simply a problem of either too little or false information and, therefore, as the same as other forms of mis- and disinformation that can be more easily corrected. Rather, our research proposes that online conspiracy theories need to be understood as a distinctive mode of digital disinformation because they are a form of vernacular knowledge and interpretation rooted in, engaged with and defined by regional and supra-regional political histories. Eschewing a universalising stance, we will be concerned with how regional European experiences with freedom of speech, press freedoms, democratic and epistemological norms, levels of state control, conflict, authoritarianism and propaganda shape online conspiracy theories.