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Conspiracy theories and incitement to harassment and violence abound on mainstream social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. But the extreme content is often mixed with ironic play, memes and hashtags, which makes it difficult for authorities and media to know how to respond.

"Murderer!" That's what former health minister Magnus Heunicke was greeted with when he was dropping his daughter off at a continuation school. Another parent was so angry about the Danish COVID vaccine program that he believed it was part of a conspiracy to kill healthy Danes. Therefore, the heckling was a perfectly reasonable reaction, he thought.

The idea of a murderous vaccine conspiracy had been spread on social media, but often mixed with memes, popular culture references and updates on users' everyday lives.

"This mixing of conspiracies, memes, hashtags, popular culture and everyday content is a characteristic of much extreme online content today. In research, we call this phenomenon hybridization," says Associate Professor and media researcher Line Nybro Petersen.

"Instead of easily decipherable right- or left-wing radical content with clear senders and opponents, social media has given us this hybrid form, which makes it incredibly difficult for police and media to distinguish between what is just online play and the more serious, which has the potential to end with harassment of a minister at a boarding school—or worse."

The algorithm needs to be fed

Nybro Petersen and her colleague Mikkel Bækby Johansen have investigated this hybrid form in a new research in the journal Social Media+Society. The two researchers conducted several case studies of some of the most popular conspiracy theory hashtags to investigate how they are shared.

When they searched for one of these hashtags on Instagram, for example #flatearth, they discovered that there were a large number of posts with groups of similar hashtags attached to them. These could be hashtags like #chemtrails, #thegreatreplacement, #COVID and #redpill.

"They have nothing to do with each other, but the logic seems to be that if you're interested in one conspiracy, you're probably also interested in the others. And then you can always throw a bunch of hashtags at the bottom of a post, which may not be about conspiracies at all," says postdoc Bækby Johansen.

"It's basically about the sharing logic of social media, where the posts need to create engagement and feed the algorithm so that the content is spread as widely as possible. It's no different than when a fashion influencer wants to get their content out to as many people as possible."

The (co-)responsibility of traditional media

In some cases, politicians such as Magnus Heunicke or other celebrities can unwittingly become part of a conspiracy narrative that is shared among many different users via hashtags and memes.

"The many shares of this type of content means that people who may not initially share the extreme views can be exposed to them on social media. Therefore, there is a huge potential for radicalization in this type of content, and this can have consequences in the real world," says Nybro Petersen.

In one high-profile case, artist Aske Kreilgaard, who was behind a statue of a breastfeeding man, suddenly became part of an American conspiracy theory about pedophilia and Satanism that also involved famous democratic politicians, explains Nybro Petersen. He ended up moving away from Denmark for a while.

Therefore, the two researchers are also critical of the way the traditional media treats these cases. They often invite conspiracy theorists into the studio or interview them, where they are allowed to make their unreasonable and libelous claims.

"The problem is that conspiracy theorists can use such an interview to gain even more attention for their cause by sharing the interview with followers and other social media users. In other words, we can see that conspiracy influencers borrow authority from the established media to position themselves among their followers," says Bækby Johansen.

"We don't mean that the cases shouldn't be treated journalistically, because, of course, they should. But the media should not become part of the problem, so we should discuss how this can be done in a responsible way," he concludes.