Book
This book advances a linguistic and cultural understanding of online conspiracy theorizing, conceptualized as distributed doubt produced through everyday talk on social media. Rather than treating conspiracy theories as cognitive errors, psychological pathologies, or products of network echo chambers, the authors analyze them as linguistic constructions—stories with recognizable semantic patterns. Drawing on distributive semantics, they use word and sentence embeddings to model the semantic space of conspiracy talk and trace how meanings are assembled, modified, and diffused online. They develop this understanding by examining conspiracy theorizing surrounding COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests. They show that conspiracy theorists engage in bricolage: a creative process of tinkering with available cultural elements to craft explanations that reduce uncertainty and threat. Conspiracy theories are habit-forming. They reconceptualize “rabbit holes” as semantic cascades, demonstrating that individuals adopt new conspiracy theories that are linguistically proximal to those they already hold, often in bursts shaped by prior adoption history and by disruptive external events. They show the spread of conspiracy theory through superspreaders, use of fear-laden language, and bots as contributors to moral panic. They show that conspiracy theorizing is a form of proto-coordination wherein opponents of social movements use shared hashtags and other cultural symbols to generate community, amplify outrage, and coordinate collective sensemaking. By foregrounding language, meaning, and interaction, the book bridges cultural sociology, computational linguistics, and diffusion theory, offering new tools for understanding how conspiracy theories emerge, spread, and persist—and how effective interventions might be designed to counter their societal harms.
Faculty
Professor of Entrepreneurship
