Conference Agenda

How do political actors build communities across platforms? This question arises when trying to understand how digital counter-publics function in far-right extremist and conspiracy-ideological milieus. To generate attention, the actors have to network well and navigate their audience across platforms. YouTube has become a key platform for far-right, conspiracy-ideological groups, and channels spreading (coronavirus) disinformation, influencing discourse from the margins to the mainstream (Baele et al., 2023; Knüpfer et al., 2023). These actors view YouTube as a vital space for networking and constructing an alternative public sphere (Munger & Phillips, 2022): Youtubers can benefit from the followership of prominent figures in the scene through mutual invitations, interviews and joint video podcasts (Lewis, 2018).

This is where our contribution comes in. Based on data from around 2,000 German Telegram channels from far-right and conspiracist milieus, we examined cross-platform use and identified which actors use Telegram and YouTube in parallel (RQ1). Additionally, we analyzed their collaborative behavior on YouTube to identify the factors underlying potential collaborations between actors (RQ2) and to assess whether these community-building efforts are successful (RQ3).

By analysing the bimodal, cross-platform link network, we were able to find 470 actors who operate channels on both platforms. Using a custom-built retrieval augmented generation (RAG) system, we were then able to identify their collaborations through shared appearances in their 77,770 videos. Exponential random graph models of the collaboration network on YouTube show that ideological similarity is the main driver of collaborations and that conspiracy ideologues in particular build bridges across milieu boundaries. Finally, we will assess the success of their community-building efforts by using Relational Event Models to analyze how collaborations influence audience viewing behavior, as reflected in the video comments.

Digital communication and social media increasingly act as sources of information and news. At the same time, this shift has facilitated the spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories, as social media has come to play a central role in the spread of conspiracy theories, particularly during crises. The COVID-19 pandemic saw an explosion of misinformation and conspiratorial narratives, with social media networks of conspiracy theorists reinforcing and amplifying these claims. While previous research has found that conspiracy theories can act as monological belief systems, so that believing in one theory predicts believing in another, less is known about whether social media conspiracy theory networks are resilient to sudden changes in the underlying societal crises. We argue that the historical and geopolitical context may mediate the extent to which the changing societal crisis act as a challenge to the resilience of conspiracy theory networks on social media.

In this paper, we examine the extent to which the social media networks of conspiracy theorists are resilient to changing crises, shifting their focus from one issue to another while retaining their network structure and the positions in those structures. We examine Finnish Twitter data of conspiracy theory networks associated with COVID-19 and examine what proportion of accounts started spreading Ukraine-related conspiracy theories and what their network positions are in both networks. We also examine how resilient the networks around these topics are to the spread of conspiracy theories. The Finnish context makes the case a "hard" test of conspiracy theory resilience because of a history of conflictual relations with Russia and because belief in the Russian narrative was marginal in Finland compared to many other countries. The results show that conspiracy networks are relatively resilient, especially the core group of users, but also that their influence outside of their own epistemic bubbles remains limited.