The Internet and the Spread of Conspiracy Content

While offering effective tools for information and new forms of “participatory journalism” (Bowman & Willis 2003), the so-called Web 2.0 has also enhanced phenomena known as “disinformation” and “misinformation”, together with the creation and propagation of hoaxes, fake news and conspiracy theories. Evidently, such phenomena also existed before, but the speed and ubiquity of the Internet have provided an extremely fertile ground for alternative narratives, therefore resulting in their evident enlargement and rapid and mostly uncontrolled spread. Not only people share and comment on official news and bulletins, but always more frequently as facts occur Internet users develop their own narratives through weblogs and social networks even before such facts are covered by institutional media. As a result, the “global village” postulated by Marshall McLuhan (1962; 1964) has rapidly taken the shape of an “alternative media ecosystem” (Starbird 2017), namely a complex network of individuals and domains that, among other things, originate and promote conspiracy theories that undermine online readers’ trust in official information. This chapter aims at describing how conspiracy theories propagate online and with which effects, by making reference to existing literature in the related fields of research and exploring a relevant case study. More specifically, we firstly deal with the idea of “spreadability” (as introduced and discussed by Jenkins, Ford & Green 2013) to gradually approach the discussion on the so-called “echo chambers” and the related issues of emotional contagion and group polarization (cf. Del Vicario et al. 2016; Quattrociocchi & Vicini 2016), and finally consider the contemporary debate on “virality” (see in particular Cosenza 2014; Varis & Blommaert 2014; Paschalidis 2015; Ferraro & Lorusso 2016; Marino & Thibault 2016; Thompson 2017) and the concept of “meme” from its introduction (cf. Dawkins 1976) to its recent reconsideration in social media and communication studies (cf. Distin 2005; Marino 2015; Cannizzaro 2016; Marino & Thibault 2016). This allows pointing out the key role of the Internet in the spread and virality of conspiracy contents.