Conspiracy theories are often thought to be resilient to disconfirming evidence, new information, and changing contexts. In addition, conspiracy theories are can be monological in the sense that belief in one theory predicts belief in another, making conspiracy theories highly resilient. Social media has become essential to the spread of disinformation and conspiracy theories because it allows for the creation of fringe networks and echo chambers based on disinformation. It is well known that the COVID-19 pandemic gave a boost to various conspiracy theories, especially online. However, less is known about what happens to conspiracy theorists’ social media networks when the societal context suddenly changes. We investigate what happened to the social media networks of COVID-19 conspiracy theorists when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. We collect and analyze data from X/Twitter to see how resilient the conspiracy theory networks associated with COVID-19 were to this sudden change by determining what proportion of accounts started spreading Ukraine-related conspiracy theories.
Using network analysis, we examine two aspects of resilience in the context of conspiracy theory networks on Finnish social media: i) how Finnish conspiracy theory networks related to COVID-19 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 overlap, and ii) how resilient 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 the population in general came to see Russia as a threat because of the invasion. Thus, the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 acted as a shock to existing conspiracy theory networks 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 community” for both topics remains limited. This result implies that Finnish social media is quite resilient against conspiracy theories, at least in these two particular topics.
