Conspiracy Theories and White Supremacy on YouTube: Exploring Affiliation and Legitimation Strategies in YouTube Comments

Abstract

Misinformation and hate speech are prevalent issues in social media research, as well as the rise of far-right extremists, white supremacists, and conspiracy theorists. In response to these concerns about unethical behavior on social media, this article explores how underlying social bonds proposed by conspiracists are discursively negotiated in YouTube comments. Through close qualitative analysis of a corpus of comments about the Notre Dame Cathedral fire, a target of xenophobic and conspiratorial claims, the study identifies the range of recurrent textual personae who respond to the conspiracy theories in the videos. The analytical focus is on the values these personae express and the discursive legitimation strategies used to strengthen their claims. This article is methodologically grounded in a social semiotic approach. Seven textual personae are identified in the dataset that each realizes a particular patterning of social bonds and legitimation strategies, for example, “Educators” legitimated the authority of experts and explained why content was false, while “White Supremacists” and “Inciters” sanctioned technology and negatively evaluated particular social groups. The method employed identifies the attitudinal positions and legitimation strategies that are at the heart of the various ideologies underlying conspiracy theories. It is a step toward developing approaches for combating misinformation and hate speech that are targeted at the key values of specific communities, and avoid overgeneralizing the motivations to produce and consume conspiratorial discourse. This approach is important since arguing logical points alone, without considering the key bonds people share, is unlikely to help in combating conspiratorial discourses.

The Platformization of Violence: Toward a Concept of Discursive Toxicity on Social Media

“…Hate speech refers to discourses that “antagonize or marginalize people based on their identification with a particular social or demographic group” (Elliott et al, 2016, p. 2). Hate speech encompasses specific types of violent discourse, such as racism (Matamoros-Fernández & Farkas, 2021), extremism (Inwood & Zappavigna, 2023), religious or gender-based attacks (Nazmine Khan et al, 2021), and other forms of xenophobic discourse (Paz et al, 2020). Other authors, such as Schoenebeck et al (2023), include hate speech within a broader category called “online harassment,” which also includes insults and doxxing.…”

YouTube discourse of the Oting massacre in Nagaland: investigating affiliations, sentiments and Naga identity negotiation in YouTube comments

“…Persona is understood as ‘an assemblage of the individual public self’ (Marshall, 2019, cited in Inwood and Zappavigna, 2023a), which helps in exploring the expression of identities online (Marshall et al, 2015). Here, the concept of textual persona as a social semiotic approach adopted in Inwood and Zappavigna (2023a) is applied.…”

“…Persona is understood as ‘an assemblage of the individual public self’ (Marshall, 2019, cited in Inwood and Zappavigna, 2023a), which helps in exploring the expression of identities online (Marshall et al, 2015). Here, the concept of textual persona as a social semiotic approach adopted in Inwood and Zappavigna (2023a) is applied. The current study is interested in the discourse communion of persons and personalities (Martin, 2009) that observes different personae, patterns of values shared and identities negotiated in the comment threads.…”

“…YouTubers as microcelebrities are significant in the construction of identities (Martínez and Olsson, 2019); discriminatory discursive strategies in YouTube comments (Chen and Flowerdew, 2019); multimodal affordances of YouTube and the construction of alternative identities (Chang and Chang, 2019); and YouTube comments and conspiracy theories (Ha et al, 2022). Recent studies explore affiliation and legitimation strategies in YouTube comments, adopting a social semiotic approach (Inwood and Zappavigna, 2023a, 2023b).…”

“…Attitude sub-system adopted fromInwood and Zappavigna (2023a).tempering affiliation strategy is mostly used in the discourse with modulating words such as 'regain', 'ensue', 'always a chance' and 'best'. Distilling affiliation comprehends the affirmation of the observation with words like 'wrong', 'led to', 'didn't', 'it was', 'did not', 'has become' and 'is to be blamed'.…”