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Responding to the World Health Organisation’s warning that misinformation related to COVID-19 constitutes an ‘infodemic’, this project studies conspiracy theories as a particularly harmful kind of misinformation.
The research will lead to improved strategies for combatting the spread of conspiracy theories in the pandemic. It will use methods from digital humanities and cultural studies to map how narratives circulate in the online environment during the crisis.
Methods will include data scraping and network visualisation tools on a longitudinal data set extracted from social media platforms to identify the mechanisms, vectors and histories of transmission of coronavirus conspiracy theories. Researchers will also employ textual analysis, digital ethnography and political economy to analyse the cultural and political contexts within which narratives arise.
By devising a series of snapshot mappings of complex online ecosystems, the research team will examine how conspiracist misinformation has proliferated during the pandemic and assess the effectiveness of the varying interventions by social media platforms.
The project, Infodemic: Combatting COVID-19 Conspiracy Theories, has been funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) starting from 1 August 2020.
It is led by Principal Investigator, Peter Knight (University of Manchester) alongside co-investigators Clare Birchall, Liliana Bounegru and Jonathan Gray (King's College London) and Dr Marc Tuters (University of Amsterdam).