Radical Right Populists and the Spread of Covid-19 Conspiracies on Facebook

• In Event: COVID Politics

Abstract

While survey-based research has consistently found that citizens with populist attitudes are more likely to believe conspiracy theories, evidence that populist actors are more likely to spread conspiracies is still mostly anecdotal, and restricted to a few prominent examples such as Donald Trump’s birtherism. One impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on public discourse has been to bring specific conspiracy theories to the surface of political debates in several countries. Common conspiracies observed in different contexts include the idea that the Coronavirus was created in a lab in China and intentionally spread through 5G networks, as well as the propagation of pre-existing anti-vaccination conspiracies. Due to being comparable across countries, Covid-19 allows us to ask, and systematically test, what political actors in Europe are more likely to spread (Corona-related) conspiracy theories on social media. We first hypothesize that politicians from populist radical right parties (PRRPs) were more likely to spread conspiracies about the Coronavirus and Corona vaccines. Further, we theorize that government’s responses to the crisis influences the volume of conspiracies spread by PRRP politicians. Our theoretical model suggests that, where government parties enjoyed a popularity boost during the period, in a kind of rally-round-the-flag effect, PRRPs were more likely to engage with conspiracy theories in order to appeal to the most fringe and dissatisfied voters, radicalizing themselves. On the other hand, in cases where the government did not experience a popularity increase in the beginning of the pandemic, PRRPs have been critical of governmental policy but not necessarily engaging in spreading outright conspiracies. We test our hypotheses by looking at all Facebook posts by national members of parliament in the EU28 since the start of the pandemic, accessed through the CrowdTangle platform, and using a combination of translated dictionaries and machine learning to identify those that positively mention or endorse a conspiracy theory. By using individual, party, and country-level data on covariates, we are able to explore the determinants of conspiracy theory spreading on Facebook by European politicians during the Covid-19 crisis. Finally, by combining measures of posts’ popularity on Facebook and vote-intention surveys, we are able to see how conspiracy endorsement affects the popularity of actors who spread them. These findings help us understand how the pandemic has had different effects on populists across countries, and to better grasp how and when elected officials turn to spreading dangerous conspiracy theories on social media, potentially lowering citizens’ willingness to get vaccinated and thus putting their entire countries in peril.

Authors

• Rosario Aguilar, Newcastle University

• Bruno de Paula Castanho Silva, University of Cologne

• Frederico Vegetti, University of Mannheim, MZES