This paper addresses the global phenomenon of anti-Soros conspiracy theories, focusing on the Central European region between 2017 and 2019. It surveys how these theories have been employed by two ...populist leaders, Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Róbert Fico in Slovakia. It further discusses these leaders' motivations for developing conspiracy narratives and the channels through which they spread them. The author argues that the usage and effectiveness of anti-Soros conspiracy narratives in influencing political supporters and the general population has been determined by the type of crisis during which leaders have found themselves and the degree of concentration of power in their hands respectively. The article is distinguished from most of the academic literature on conspiracy theories by focusing on 'mainstream' populist leaders, instead of extremist political parties or authoritarian regimes that often use conspiracy theories as well.
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BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, ODKLJ, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, caused by the Severe Acute Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), is a global health threat with extensive misinformation and conspiracy theories. Therefore, this ...study investigated the knowledge, attitude and perception of sub-Saharan Africans (SSA) on COVID-19 during the exponential phase of the pandemic. In this cross-sectional survey, self-administered web-based questionnaires were distributed through several online platforms. A total of 1046 respondents from 35 SSA countries completed the survey. The median age was 33 years (18-76 years) and about half (50.5%) of them were males. More than 40% across all socio-demographic categories except the Central African region (21.2%), vocational/secondary education (28.6%), student/unemployed (35.5%), had high COVID-19 knowledge score. Socio-demographic factors and access to information were associated with COVID-19 knowledge. Bivariate analysis revealed that independent variables, including the region of origin, age, gender, education and occupation, were significantly (p < 0.05) associated with COVID-19 knowledge. Multivariate analysis showed that residing in East (odds ratio OR: 7.9, 95% confidence interval (CI): 4.7-14, p<0.001), Southern (OR: 3.7, 95% CI: 2.1-6.5, p<0.001) and West (OR: 3.9, 95% CI: 2.9-5.2, p<0.001) Africa was associated with high COVID-19 knowledge level. Apart from East Africa (54.7%), willingness for vaccine acceptance across the other SSA regions was <40%. About 52%, across all socio-demographic categories, were undecided. Knowledge level, region of origin, age, gender, marital status and religion were significantly (p < 0.05) associated with COVID-19 vaccine acceptance. About 67.4% were worried about contracting SARS-CoV-2, while 65.9% indicated they would consult a health professional if exposed. More than one-third of the respondents reported that their governments had taken prompt measures to tackle the pandemic. Despite high COVID-19 knowledge in our study population, most participants were still undecided regarding vaccination, which is critical in eliminating the pandemic. Therefore, extensive, accurate, dynamic and timely education in this aspect is of ultimate priority.
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DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Holding the greatest area of rainforest in the world, Brazil has seen the adoption of a far-right anti-environmental agenda under the administration of Jair Bolsonaro. This agenda was backed by a ...transnational infrastructure of right-wing media outlets on online platforms, including the conservative YouTube channel Brasil Paralelo. Our research attempted to understand how environmental conspiracies in Brasil Paralelo’s documentary Cortina de Fumaça (in English, smokescreen) took advantage of both digital platform affordances and political alignment with the far-right government to gain social adherence and relevance. By carrying out topic modeling on more than 13,000 comments and network analysis of 982 recommended videos on YouTube, we aimed to analyze the following: (1) which narratives fostered in the documentary have reverberated among the audience that published comments on its YouTube page and (2) what type of video does YouTube recommend for users who watched Cortina de Fumaça. Our results show that far-right anti-environmental discourse is instrumentalized as yet another component of modern culture wars, where environmental conspiracies are placed side by side with other conspiratorial claims regarding politics, gender, religion, and other ideological subjects.
Conspiracy theories are spreading faster than ever and pose a real danger to our societies. It is natural to accuse the consumers of conspiracy theories of irrationality - that they are either not ...looking at or appropriately sensitive to all the available evidence. In this paper, I attempt to determine if we can make sense of this general idea. I argue that we cannot: conspiracy theories do not spread because the people who believe them are irrational - at least, not necessarily so. In addition, I explore some alternative strategies for responding to the problem of the spread of conspiracy theories. I argue that in addition to confrontational strategies such as social shaming, we need more constructive programs of community activism to battle the spread of conspiracy theories.
In Myanmar, Buddhist nationalist movements created a pan-Burmese anti-Muslim moral panic in response to the political and economic liberalisation starting in 2011 and to riots between Buddhists and ...Muslims that erupted from 2012. Based mainly on Buddhist nationalist sermons and speeches, but also on interviews and fieldwork, the aim of this article is to examine the historical and cultural roots of the anti-Muslim moral panic and its political ramifications. This article argues that Buddhist nationalist sermons contributed to moral panic in three ways. First through aspects of monastic authority by which nationalist, anti-Muslim discourse was authorised. Second, an anti-Muslim conspiracy theory going back to the 1950s and an ingrained historical narrative feeding a sense of collective victimhood and vulnerability among the Buddhist majority created fear that provides justification of discrimination and violence. Third, is a perceived existential threat to Buddhism and Myanmar's sovereignty considered to be posed by groups of Muslims (local and international) that were interconnected in the nationalist imagination; a sense of threat that was reinforced by a globalised Islamophobia.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, ODKLJ, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Belief in conspiracy theories has often been associated with a biased perception of randomness, akin to a nothing-happens-by-accident heuristic. Indeed, a low prior for randomness (i.e., believing ...that randomness is a priori unlikely) could plausibly explain the tendency to believe that a planned deception lies behind many events, as well as the tendency to perceive meaningful information in scattered and irrelevant details; both of these tendencies are traits diagnostic of conspiracist ideation. In three studies, we investigated this hypothesis and failed to find the predicted association between low prior for randomness and conspiracist ideation, even when randomness was explicitly opposed to malevolent human intervention. Conspiracy believers' and nonbelievers' perceptions of randomness were not only indistinguishable from each other but also accurate compared with the normative view arising from the algorithmic information framework. Thus, the motto "nothing happens by accident," taken at face value, does not explain belief in conspiracy theories.
Recent studies documented alarming growth in antiscientific discourse among extremist groups online and especially the relatively high anti-vaccine attitudes among White Nationalists (WN). In light ...of accelerated politization of COVID-19 containment measures and the expansion of containment to lockdowns, masking, and more, we examine current sentiment, themes and argumentation in white nationalist discourse, regarding the COVID-19 vaccines and other containment measures. We use unsupervised machine learning approaches to analyze all conversations posted in the “Coronavirus (Covid-19)” sub-forum on Stormfront between January 2020 and December 2021 (N = 9642 posts). Additionally, we manually analyze sentiment and argumentation in 300 randomly sampled posts. We identified four discursive themes: Science, Conspiracies, Sociopolitical, and Containment. Negative- sentiment was substantially higher than what was found in prior work done before COVID-19 regarding vaccines and other containment measures. The negativity was driven mostly by arguments adapted from the anti-vaccine movement and not by WN ideology.
While the doctors' role in immunization is essential, their lack of knowledge or vaccine hesitancy may affect their ability to communicate effectively and educate patients about vaccination, vaccine ...hesitancy, and vaccine conspiracy theories. This, in turn, may hinder health policy aimed at fighting infectious diseases. Vaccine hesitancy is prevalent not only among the general population but also among healthcare workers; thus, this study is aimed at assessing future doctors' attitudes towards anti-vax conspiracy theories. A total of 441 medical students at Poznan University of Medical Sciences completed a web-based survey designed to explore their attitudes toward the six most prevalent anti-vaccine conspiracy theories. The survey showed that although over 97% of future doctors support vaccinations as an effective form of fighting infectious diseases, and 80% did not believe in any anti-vax conspiracy theory, a significant fraction of 20% of medical students either believed in at least one such theory or were unsure. It has also shown that male and younger students who had not received a flu vaccination and defined themselves as politically right-wing or conservative and religious were more likely to believe in anti-vax conspiracy theories. Our data suggest that, in order to overcome medical students' ambivalent attitudes towards anti-vax conspiracy theories, they should receive more education about the importance of vaccination in preventing disease and about effective ways to combat vaccine hesitancy and anti-vax conspiracy theories.
We analyse how teachers position themselves towards conspiracy theories in teaching contexts following the methodology of conversation analysis and positioning theory. For the analysis we selected ...sequences in which three teachers narrate and comment retrospectively on incidents from their everyday school life in which their students confronted them with conspiracy theories. Since conspiracy theories are seen as a complex and potentially explosive phenomenon in both public and academic discourse, many see it as mandatory to take or at least express a critical stance towards them. In general, however, conspiracy theories make it difficult to take a clear position, as they are often vague and incoherent on evaluative, textual, functional and epistemic levels. These ambiguities are also reflected in the teachers’ positions as evidenced in our data: On the one hand, they emphasise the need to raising students’ awareness of how to identify conspiracy theories and how to adopt a critical stance towards them. On the other hand, the micro-analytical reconstruction of the narrative sequences of concrete classroom situations shows that the teachers do not always act in line with these beliefs. This can be interpreted as a tension between socially conforming positioning acts towards conspiracy theories on the one and the teachers‘ professional self-perception on the other hand.
