Influencers and mainstreaming conspiracy theoiries

In the last few years, it has become evident that conspiracy theories present several threats to society. One of them is strengthening and supporting far-right ideologies and consequently – violence (CREST, 2024). While sufficient research has been done already to understand why and how people believe in conspiracy theories, we are still yet to fully understand the process of their mainstreaming. Research shows that social media has become the key instrument for it, allowing followers of conspiracy theories reach wide audiences with the help of recommendation mechanisms and the use of creative tools such as visuals, podcasts, memes, games, pop-culture references etc. (Cinelli et al., 2022; Enders et al., 2021). One of the further ways that allow conspiracy theories to spread is so-called “ideological entrepreneurs” (Hyzen et al., 2021)– celebrities and influencers, like Donald Trump, Victor Orban, Kanye West, Elon Musk, and others that publicly endorse (or at the very least do not deny) certain ideas, which makes them more credible in the eyes of their followers. While these people are believed to have an impact on the spread of conspiracy theories, not much is known about the actual effect their messages have on their audiences. Do their messages get mostly consumed by the audience that is already predisposed to believe in conspiracies or can they reach out and potentially affect a larger audience how do these audiences make sense of the ideas that come from these people’s accounts? This project aims to answer these questions by selecting the pool of “ideological entrepreneurs” on X who are believed to contribute to the spread of conspiracies. Then it will be conducting a social network analysis to track the trajectory of their posts and understand how far beyond its “normal” audiences they go and whether they are able to reach wider communities that are not inclined to conspiratorial thinking. It will then do a sentiment analysis of comments under the posts to understand the reaction of the accounts’ audiences to the content they disseminate. Finally, focus groups research will be conducted to measure to what extent the personality of the “entrepreneur” affects people’s perception of the message as trustworthy.