Sixth International Conference on Communication & Media Studies

Abstract

As Covid-19 became the first pandemic of the globally connected era, old wars took new shapes and old messages found new voices and new pathways to disseminate. Conspiracy theories are known to emerge in times of societal distress, but this pandemic, which brought about a communication inflation and favoured people’s exacerbated reliance on social media and the online environment in general, helped them flourish on novel territories. In countries like Romania, where Western and Eastern narratives fight on an ideological battleground, conspiracy-driven explanations can have geopolitical meanings and consequences. Using data mining and text analysis tools like network analysis and topic modeling, I investigate patterns in social media narratives, looking to identify the roles of communicators and information flows, to uncover dissemination maps, and to gain insight into the structure of the online conversation about the Western model in a period of intense pressure.