Marwick, A., Pippert, C., Furl, K., & Schnabel, E. (2025). Shapeshifters and starseeds: Populist knowledge production, generous epistemology, and disinformation on U.s. conspiracy TikTok. Social Media + Society, 11. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051251357483
Summary
This article introduces “ConspiracyTok” — a genre of TikTok videos promoting conspiracy theories — and examines it through a qualitative content analysis of 202 highly viewed videos from 153 creators. The authors’ central intervention is demographic and epistemological: ConspiracyTok is disproportionately produced by young, non-White, and/or female creators who diverge sharply from the stereotype of the middle-aged White male conspiracy theorist. Using TikTok’s platform affordances, these creators construct visual “evidence” and cultivate intimacy with viewers. The authors theorize this as “populist knowledge production” operating within a “generous epistemology” — a mode that welcomes divergent truths and can simultaneously empower marginalized standpoints and circulate disinformation, antisemitism, transphobia, and QAnon-style tropes.
Key Contributions
- One of the first empirical, identity-focused analyses of conspiracy content on TikTok, documenting a demographic shift away from the stereotypical White male conspiracy theorist.
- Introduces the concepts of populist knowledge production and generous epistemology to describe how creators legitimize alternative knowledge claims while mimicking institutional (academic, journalistic) forms.
- Connects feminist standpoint epistemology to disinformation studies, showing how marginalized epistemologies can both critique systemic injustice and amplify falsehoods.
- Identifies genre conventions (curated evidence collection, greenscreen documentary aesthetics, pillow-Tok intimacy, deep lore) as memetic features sustaining the genre across ideological divides.
- Extends work on conspirituality, showing how it functions as a boundary object linking otherwise dissimilar communities.
Methods
Qualitative content analysis of 202 TikTok videos from 153 unique creators collected May–September 2022. Sampling was triangulated: searching conspiracy hashtags (#conspiracytok, greatawakening, nojabforme, etc.), tracking prolific creators, identifying recurring sounds, and following two popular “stitches.” Two coders used a piloted codebook recording perceived identity markers (race, gender, age, sexuality, politics, appearance, setting), evidence types, and victim/villain framings, combining denotative coding with connotative memos. The analysis was grounded in critical, feminist framing drawing on standpoint epistemology and the sociology of fringe communities; engagement metrics were computed for the 156 non-deplatformed videos (mean ~3.67M views).
Findings
- Roughly 33% of creators were women, 36% non-White, and ~64% appeared to be in their teens/twenties; the dataset was overwhelmingly U.S.-based and English-language.
- Black creators signaled Blackness through natural hairstyles, headwear, AAVE, and cultural references, suggesting content addressed to Black audiences; 25 creators displayed “conspiritual”/bohemian markers linking New Age spirituality to conspiracy.
- Common villains: the U.S. government (n=43), “them/powers that be” (n=33), science/scientists (n=29), and celebrities (n=29). Common victims: the “unsuspecting public” (n=63), Americans (n=22), children (n=17), and Black artists.
- Evidence was predominantly visual — photographs (74), video clips (61), b-roll (38), search-result screenshots (37) — with ~53% of videos using “curated evidence collection,” often via greenscreen.
- Legitimacy was built through documentary aesthetics, deep esoteric lore (Icke, Sitchin, Saint-Yves d’Alveydre), close readings of fiction (“predictive programming”), personal anecdote, and calls to “do your own research.”
- Some videos advanced factually grounded critiques of state violence (MOVE bombing, Operation Paperclip, CIA and crack cocaine), aligning with standpoint epistemology; others reinforced antisemitic, transphobic, or QAnon tropes.
Connections
This paper is closely tied to other Marwick-authored work on disinformation and vernacular knowledge production — see Marwick2026-qd and Marwick2025-vx. Its treatment of conspirituality and fringe-community dynamics connects to Grusauskaite2026-po and to work on far-right and extremist online cultures such as Askanius2026-de. The focus on platform-specific genre conventions and short-video circulation also relates to TikTok- and platform-focused radicalization research including Rothut2026-or and Rothut2026-wt.