Grusauskaite, K., Bondt, M. D., de Wildt, L., & Aupers, S. (2026). “We, the conspiracy theorists.” How people do symbolic boundary work in the “Great Reset” debates across social media platforms. New Media & Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448261446590
Summary
This article reframes online conspiracy culture as a project of collective identity-making rather than as a problem of misinformation, platforms, or ideology. Through multimodal discourse analysis of 524 posts and nearly 68,000 comments about the “Great Reset” (GR) across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, YouTube, Reddit, and TikTok, the authors show how participants construct a shared “we” through symbolic boundary work: reclaiming the stigmatized label “conspiracy theorist,” styling themselves as autonomous “critical thinkers,” and recasting personal hardship as evidence of a shared struggle against a “mainstream other.” The central argument is that conspiracy cultures are sustained by relational and affective work — solidarity, resentment, and moral duty — more than by platform affordances or ideological coherence.
Key Contributions
- Imports Lamont-style symbolic boundary work into the study of online conspiracy cultures as an alternative to echo-chamber and algorithmic-radicalization accounts.
- Provides cross-platform empirical evidence (six major platforms) that conspiratorial identity strategies are strikingly uniform across very different affordances.
- Documents the formation of “diagonal movements”: situational coalitions binding ideologically divergent groups (secular–libertarian and religious-Christian) around anti-institutional sentiment.
- Foregrounds affective solidarity and shared personal hardship — not shared belief — as the glue of conspiracy communities.
- Contributes to a cultural sociology of social media, shifting attention from informational content to meaning-making and identity.
- Suggests policy implications: debunking strategies are likely to fail because they ignore the relational and emotional foundations of conspiracy belonging.
Methods
Qualitative multimodal discourse analysis (Norris) of posts, comments, images, and videos discussing the GR between the May 2022 and January 2023 WEF meetings. Data were collected via keyword searches using Octoparse web scraping and manual archiving (~100 top posts per platform; 24 on YouTube due to length), yielding 524 posts and 67,848 comments. Coding proceeded iteratively from 117 inductive open codes through axial coding to 32 final codes organized around in-group construction, out-group construction, and discursive practices. The theoretical scaffolding combines Lamont on symbolic boundaries, Goffman on stigma, and Jenkins on social identity.
Findings
- A shared “deep state phobia” and anti-institutional orientation cut across otherwise divergent ideological positions.
- Two ideal-typical strands — secular–libertarian (anti-state-overreach) and religious-Christian (apocalyptic biblical reading) — converge situationally around the GR.
- Participants build in-group identity by branding themselves “critical thinkers” and speaking in collective “we” terms, paradoxically grounding groupness in claims of individual autonomy.
- The label “conspiracy theorist” is inverted into a badge of honor, signaling epistemic superiority and belonging.
- Personal stories of economic precarity and family hardship are reworked into Hochschild-style “deep stories” that produce affective solidarity and mutual care alongside resentment.
- The out-group — the “mainstream” or “sheeple” — is framed as brainwashed, generating a perceived moral duty to “awaken” them.
- Contrary to expectations, discursive strategies were remarkably consistent across platforms, undercutting purely affordance-driven explanations.
Connections
No other papers under shared topics were provided, so there are no in-corpus wikilinks to make here. Intellectually, the paper sits at the intersection of Lamont’s symbolic boundaries tradition, Hochschild’s “deep stories,” and a growing cultural-sociological pushback against techno-centric (echo chamber, filter bubble) accounts of online radicalization, and would link naturally to work on diagonal movements and participatory conspiracy culture once such notes exist.
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