Conspiracy Theorists’ Responses to Deplatforming

The next presenter in this AoIR 2023 session is Kamile Grusauskaite, whose interest is in the deplatforming of mis- and disinformation – the removal of accounts for breaking platform rules, for instance on disinformation or hate speech. This has particularly targetted conspiracy theorists, yet such conspiracists still spread on alternative media or find ways to circumvent prohibitions on mainstream media.

Conspiracy theories can be understood as a form of stigmatised knowledge, and represent a form of deviance on the Internet. Kamile researched this through an ethnographic approach, tracing conspiracy theorists’ moves across platforms and attending two US conspiracist conventions, where she also conducted interviews with some 22 participants (!) to understand their strategies for navigating this space.

There was a strong sense of being silenced and deplatformed amongst the participants of such conferences, and this produces a deep sense of collective loss amongst these communities; they feel collectively stigmatised and make binary distinctions between their ‘good’ communities and the ‘bad’ platforms and other authorities suppressing them. Strategies to address this include accommodation (remaining on social media to amplify their views, and posting edited versions of their videos and other content that will not be banned here, yet also pulling interested users towards other platforms where it is possible to be more open about the full extent of their views); bypassing (replatforming to more accepting spaces, and taking offline action – including in the 6 January 2021 coup attempt in the US – instead of remaining purely online); and reclaiming stigma (by counter-labelling and counter-stigmatising those actors who they felt were stigmatising the conspiracist community, using terms such as ‘normies’ and ‘sheeple’, and thereby taking pride in their deplatforming).

This use of the conceptual toolbox of deviance enables us to better understand the strategies for relating conspiracist and mainstream communities; it provides an account of exclusion from the inside of such conspiracy theorist communities. Similar practices may be in place with other (rightly or wrongly) stigmatised communities, and show the (perhaps unintended) impacts of moral entrepreneurship.