The Media Ecology of Conspiracy: Formation, Circulation, Platform
The papers gathered here converge on a single, deceptively simple premise: conspiracy belief is not a fixed cognitive trait waiting to be “triggered” by exposure, but an emergent property of media systems—the interaction of predispositions, platform affordances, journalistic routines, and narrative form. Read together, they trace an arc from macro-level questions about where conspiracy content circulates and who it reaches, toward increasingly fine-grained accounts of how it is narratively and discursively constructed once it arrives.
Cross-Media Contagion and Mitigation
Adam2026-tz anchors the empirical end of this arc, using panel-plus-web-tracking data to show that conspiracy belief formation is a “marriage” of media exposure and political predisposition: alternative media produce contagion effects, mainstream media produce mitigation effects, but populist and mistrustful audiences selectively engage with the former and avoid (or counterargue against) the latter. Crucially, the paper complicates any clean alternative-vs-mainstream binary by showing that quality outlets themselves circulated substantial conspiracy-supporting content. Rothut2026-or extends this ecological view to the meso level of protest movements, showing how the Querdenken movement on Telegram functioned as a connective bridge—via shared anti-elite framing rather than explicit ideology—linking heterogeneous, moderate publics to entrenched far-right and conspiracist networks. Both papers insist that conspiracy circulation cannot be understood at the level of isolated platforms or messages; it requires tracing actual pathways of exposure and network embedding across a media system. De_Leon2025-qn pushes this ecological logic further conceptually, arguing that existing exposure research is too narrowly fixated on direct encounters with flagged conspiracy content, neglecting how “networked exposure” repurposes ordinary, ostensibly neutral material (news stories, Wikipedia entries) once it circulates within conspiracy-aligned networks—a reminder that the boundary between “conspiracy media” and “mainstream media” is porous and situational.
Journalism’s Complicity and the Search Infrastructure
Several papers zero in on institutional actors ordinarily cast as conspiracy’s opponents. Rohrbach2026-rc examines how journalistic strategies themselves—framing choices, narrative conventions—can inadvertently manufacture new conspiracy beliefs rather than merely transmit or debunk pre-existing ones, complicating any simple firewall between “responsible” and “irresponsible” media. Kasianenko2026-tn extends this institutional scrutiny to search infrastructures, auditing how Google’s organic results and AI Overviews respond differently to conspiratorially versus neutrally framed queries; the finding that AI guardrails are robust for established theories (chemtrails) but can inadvertently legitimize newer ones (15-minute cities) as “debates” shows how algorithmic moderation itself becomes a site of narrative negotiation—commercial and news sources bleed into query results in ways that can reinforce the very frames they aim to debunk. Dubey2026-bl offers a counterintuitive experimental coda to this institutional strand: “balanced news chatbots” mixing mainstream and alternative perspectives are trusted more, not less, by high-conspiracy-belief users, suggesting that technological correctives premised on assumptions of conspiracist defensiveness may misjudge their audience.
Narrative as the Unit of Analysis
A second cluster shifts the analytic object from “exposure” to “narrative” itself, arguing that conspiracy and disinformation research has too often treated stories as self-evident bundles of true/false claims. Marwick2026-qd makes the foundational move here, reconceptualizing disinformation as cross-platform, identity-affirming, cathartic narrative—characters, settings, plots, signaled by discursive and visual catchphrases—that spreads because it satisfies desire and moral alignment, not because it survives fact-checking. Sadler2025-vu radicalizes this narrative turn theoretically, indicting the field’s naïve, common-sense use of “narrative” and proposing a hermeneutic-realist, narratological framework (drawing on Ricoeur and Phelan) capable of showing how content can be referentially and ethically suspect—reducing complexity via disnarration and false multivocality—without being straightforwardly false. Together these two papers argue for an entirely different evidentiary standard: narrative coherence, moral framing, and affective payoff, rather than propositional accuracy, are what make conspiratorial content travel.
Platform Vernaculars and Identity Work
A third strand asks how these narrative dynamics are inflected by platform-specific affordances and the identity work of participants. Marwick2025-ov documents how “ConspiracyTok” is populated disproportionately by young, non-White, and female creators who build epistemic legitimacy through visual evidence, deep lore, and intimacy cues—a “generous epistemology” that is simultaneously standpoint-empowering and disinformation-prone. Gardam2025-er complements this with a methodological intervention, insisting that image-centric platforms like Instagram demand visual-first analytic tools, since climate-denial conspiracy narratives there are constructed multimodally in ways text-centric coding would miss. Hollingshead2026-vx extends the affordance question to TikTok’s immigration discourse, finding that ideologically opposed users deploy the platform’s memetic, mimetic features in strikingly symmetrical ways—suggesting that platform vernacular, rather than platform bias, may be the more powerful explanatory variable, and that generative AI is beginning to supply new resources for “speculative worldbuilding” within anti-immigrant conspiracy content. Grusauskaite2026-po offers the strongest counterweight to platform-affordance determinism within this group: examining “Great Reset” discourse across six platforms, the authors find remarkably consistent symbolic boundary work—reclaiming the “conspiracy theorist” label, constructing a collective “we” of critical thinkers against “sheeple”—regardless of platform architecture, arguing that identity and affective solidarity, not algorithmic logics, are what sustain conspiracy cultures.
Dissent, Solidarity, and the Limits of Consensus Narratives
Finally, Giglietto2017-4375de2f provides a historical anchor and a useful foil: the #JeNeSuisPasCharlie case shows that even in moments of apparent mass consensus, dissenting counter-narratives find discursive footholds on social media, prefiguring the boundary-work dynamics later papers describe in more developed conspiracist contexts. Read as a whole, the collection moves from establishing that media systems causally implicate conspiracy belief, through interrogating journalism’s and platforms’ complicity in that process, to insisting—via the narrative and identity-focused papers—that conspiracy’s real explanatory locus lies in story-form, affect, and collective meaning-making rather than in exposure metrics or algorithmic curation alone.