Iginio Gagliardone presented to the Institute as part of our fall research series, bringing questions of conspiracy, context and agency that arose in his latest co-authored article in Social Media and Society. He began by contextualizing his work, stating that he did not begin with a desire to be necessarily critical, but to do more conventional research on misinformation through digital methods: harvesting tweets, using hashtags and keywords in their investigation on online conspiracy in South Africa and Nigeria. He said that the paper they could have written may have found that “conspiracies are somehow marginal, pushing up against the moral panic about misinformation.” While this in itself could have been an interesting contribution to the literature, they were not totally satisfied with that answer.
This led them to start asking questions about who is distributing misinformation beyond the biggest nodes or influencers, asking “what are users saying around conspiracies’” and “are these conspiracies part of a larger political history or project?” in order to examine the substantive claims that emerged from the Tweets they collected. They collected tweets coming from Nigeria and South Africa in the context of Covid-19 with keywords “5G” or “Bill Gates”. They were collected over a period of three months, starting two weeks before lockdown, with a resulting corpus of three million tweets per country. From which, Iginio and co-authors found some key differences and similarities between the cases of South Africa and Nigeria.
Overall, the vast majority of conspiratorial content was far away from the centre of Twitter conversations in both countries. Also, they found that the “tweets show disconnection from global conspiratorial networks, though some tropes like ‘liberal media’ and ‘global elites’ were engaged.” Of this discussion, conspiracy around 5G was more significant in Nigeria, whereas South Africans engaged more with conspiracies on Bill Gates. They found that “the vast majority of discussion was away from the centre of conversation on twitter; conspiracy did occur but didn’t occupy centre stage.”
Iginio and co-authors found that in their case studies, people are “not passive conveyors of conspiracies.” For example in Nigeria, both 5G and Bill Gates conspiracies were “transformed into opportunistic responses to debates on government corruption and political opposition to it”. The responses were not necessarily rational, but they did tap into anxieties, such as anti-Asian sentiment and Covid-19 being linked with worries about being too dependent on loans from China. In South Africa the case of 5G conspiracy “marginally intersected with local debates,” where Iginio highlighted that rearticulation of discourses already circulating within communities carried more weight than 5G itself. The Gates conspiracy was more dense in South Africa, evoking tropes of white saviours in rejection of vaccines from Western countries.
In these two cases, can we say this information is fake or false? “With a long history of paternalistic attitudes towards the Global South, these conspiracies became opportunities to speak back to power”, Iginio said. He outlined that overall their inquiry led to three challenges and possible responses to some of the mainstream discussion around misinformation. First, conspiracies are just interpreted as proxies for mis/disinformation, where simply the source of a tweet is considered a strong enough marker to consider a piece of information untrustworthy (such as Sputnik from Russia or Sinhua from China). Second, there is a persistent centre/periphery mentality which maintains that information flowing from the centre will be relevant to the rest of the world. Third, much research on misinformation and hate speech starts from the assumption that modes of participation are an aberration of rational debates, missing the creative ways in which users share information that doesn’t necessarily fit this category. These challenges to mainstream approaches will continue to be in our minds at the Digital Democracies Institute as we continue our inquiry into questions of misinformation.