Re-gendering conspirational thinking: Usage of media, gender differences and beliefs in conspiracy theories on COVID-19

With the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, conspiracy theories spread on social media, attributing the origin of the virus to a "leakage" from a Chinese laboratory, or to an invention by big pharmaceutical companies and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Recent studies underline how social media represent the ideal public media arena for spreading these deceptive contents (Wang et al., 2019) - despite the attempt of the platforms to implement a policy of "containment" aiming to remove them (Rogers, 2020). However, existing literature demonstrates an association between social media use and beliefs in conspiracy theories and misinformation on COVID-19 (Jamieson & Albarrac, 2020; Theocharis et. al. 2021, Quinn et al. 2021), our understanding of how gender differences may mediate the role that media (both social and legacy) play in shaping conspiracy theories beliefs is more limited. Some scholars highlight, indeed, how gender is typically treated as a control variable in multivariate models aimed at testing theories about other correlates of conspiratorial thinking (Cassese et al, 2020). In order to fill this gap - the aim of this paper is to investigate whether social and traditional media affected gender differences in beliefs conspiracy theories – treating those regarding COVID-19 as case study – and how these beliefs correlate with the frequency and patterns of media consumption. We collected data from ValCon Project surveys analyzing usage of social and traditional media by citizens from six European countries (Italy, Germany, France, Spain, Poland and Ireland) on issues like the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic spread.