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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Sociol.
Sec. Sociology of Law
Volume 9 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fsoc.2024.1374042
This article is part of the Research Topic Changing Digital Relations between Science and Society: Implications for Democracy and Human Rights View all articles

Making Sense of a Pandemic: Reasoning About COVID-19 in the Intellectual Dark Web

Provisionally accepted
Sean Doody Sean Doody 1,2*
  • 1 University of Maryland, College Park, College Park, United States
  • 2 National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, University of Maryland, College Park, United States

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    In this study, I examine how users of an online Reddit community, r/IntellectualDarkWeb, forged an anti-establishment collective identity through practices of “heterodox scientific” reasoning. I do so through a discursive analysis of comments and posts made to r/IntellectualDarkWeb during the COVID-19 pandemic. First, I deploy the BERTopic algorithm to cluster my corpus and surface topics pertaining to COVID-19. Second, I engage in a qualitative content analysis of the relevant clusters to understand how discourses about COVID-19 were mobilized by subreddit users. I show that discussions about COVID-19 were polarized along “contrarian” and “anti-contrarian” lines, with significant implications for the subreddit’s process of collective identity. Overwhelmingly, contrarian content that expressed skepticism towards vaccines, mistrust towards experts, and cynicism about the medical establishment was affirmed by r/IntellectualDarkWeb users. By contrast, anti-contrarian content that sought to counter anti-vaccine rhetoric, defend expertise, or criticize subreddit users for their contrarianism was sanctioned. A key factor in this dynamic was Reddit’s scoring mechanism, which empowered users to publicly upvote contrarian affirming content while simultaneously downvoting anti-contrarian content. As users participated in sensemaking about the COVID-19 vaccine, they deployed Reddit’s scoring mechanism to reinforce a contrarian collective identity oriented around a practice of “heterodox science.” My research shows the continued relevance of the concept of collective identity in the digital age and its utility for understanding contemporary “reactionary” social movements.

    Keywords: Intellectual dark web, Reddit, Social Media, collective identity, COVID-19, Vaccines, Social Movements, Topic Modeling

    Received: 21 Jan 2024; Accepted: 31 Jul 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Doody. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Sean Doody, University of Maryland, College Park, College Park, United States

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.