Editorial: Paranoid publics: conspiracy theories and the public sphere

Editorial on the Research Topic
Paranoid publics: conspiracy theories and the public sphere

“Chatter amongst those in control has begun. They know we know which means the public will know.”

- Q

Conspiracy theories have become a seemingly unavoidable aspect of both online and offline life in the 21^st century. Although most individuals now have vast resources for information access and retrieval, we are still susceptible to explain historical events through paranoid delusions about secret plotters controlling our lives. National tragedies, unexplained phenomena, and major historical events spark a flurry of online conspiracy theorists “simply asking questions.” Conspiracy narratives bleed from the dark corners of the internet and into the mainstream via social-media platforms, family gatherings, and other interpersonal relations. Openly embracing these ideas used to be a closely guarded secret, for fear of public censure. Today these ideas are now broadcast on nightly television newscasts. Tucker Carlson, before he was terminated from Fox News, for example, routinely championed the white-supremacist “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, which posits that elites are deliberately replacing white people with migrants (Bond, 2023). Former American president Donald Trump appeared at a CNN town hall for his 2024 re-election campaign and repeated his now-familiar mantra about the 2020 elections being stolen despite promises to stop spreading such lies publicly (Lowell, 2023). Online and offline communities bleed into one another, and ideas espoused on social media become offline ideologies, which affect personal relationships and public discourse: we are facing a public crisis caused by bad information.

Although conspiracy theories have been a prominent aspect of American public and political life since the nation's founding (Walker, 2013; Uscinski and Parent, 2014), they have become more visible and easily transmissible through social-media platforms (Cinelli et al., 2022). If the internet represents the contemporary public square, a space in which public discourse happens, the rise and spread of paranoid and delusional conspiracy theories through a fully networked society represents a challenge to the notion of a fundamentally reasonable public sphere (Papacharissi, 2002). In the wake of the 2016 U.S. presidential elections, the online public sphere underwent a fundamental transformation in which the trolling jouissance of the chans (Phillips, 2015)—imageboards in which anonymous individuals post about any number of topics from anime to porn to conspiracy theories—gave rise to QAnon, a repackaged antisemitic conspiracy theory for the internet age. While the conspiracy theory itself is nothing new, as a social phenomenon the speed of its spread, additional layers of complexity added to it, and the power it holds over others is nothing short of fascinating—especially because of Q's eschatological predictions consistently failing to materialize. Instead, the particularities of the QAnon mythos have produced a widespread conspiracism extending far beyond the actual QAnon community into the broader public consciousness (Muirhead and Rosenblum, 2019; Sommer, 2023). Conspiracy theories have now become a mainstream form of public discourse, such that even ostensibly non-politicized topics such as vaccine usage during a global pandemic are debatable by common citizens doing their own “research” (Birchall and Knight, 2022). In such a flooded information zone as the internet, citizen investigations can aspire to the same authority as any other official information source.

The contemporary public sphere is thus both fragmented and, at the same time, aggregate; moreover, the various shards have become equally viable as competing public spaces due to the ubiquity and scope of platforms, which have become de facto public spheres in the information society (Hassan, 2008; Çela, 2015). The complexity of such a networked public sphere has only increased since 2016 and produced a “multiverse” of public spheres, which exist simultaneously within various internet echo chambers and enclaves but which interface with one another through ideological and political eruptions. Furthermore, these various public spheres vie for legitimacy and authority even when they are paranoid, delusional, and conspiratorial, and there seems to be no official mechanism to expel them from public consideration as legitimate alternatives (Habermas, 2022). The question thus remains whether a normative public sphere against which competing modes of publicness can be measured is even possible today.

The essays in this cluster address the various aspects of the public sphere in the age of conspiracy theory. Each author maps different contours of the “paranoid publics” that structure our democracy. From the prevalence of conspiracy rhetoric within alternative health spaces (Conner) to the impact of conspiracy theory on public health (Pinazo-Calatayud et al.), from conspiracism in public spaces such as libraries (Greer and Beene) to the symbolic logic of conspiracy theory (Hughes), the articles in this cluster provide important new perspectives on the public impact of conspiracism. As de Zeeuw theorizes in his contribution to the cluster, “The resulting weaponization of digital public sphere imaginaries complicates attempts to recuperate the idea (l) of a digital public sphere as a solution to a ‘polluted' information environment.” The contributions to “paranoid publics” thus reveal the dangers of complexities of a coherent publicness in the era of social media and increasing extremism. We may soon discover that an increasingly extreme conspiracism has become the normal mode of engaging the world.

Author contributions

MH: Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing. CC: Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing.

Funding

The author(s) declare that no financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher's note

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