ABSTRACT
Contemporary media represent a particularly fertile ground for conspiracy theories. This chapter analyses how conspiracy theories proliferate through contemporary online media – the so-called ‘new media’ – and with what effects. While a number of scholarly studies on conspiracy theories have focused on their manifestation in the mass media, in fact, only a few have analysed them in digital media, providing interesting but limited results. The wide spread of conspiracy theories in contemporary mediascapes can be seen as an uncontrolled contagion that, thanks to both the permeability of culture and the agency of memes, has increasingly affected social discourses. Exactly as with other viral texts, conspiracy theories would have therefore progressively ‘infected’ the Internet, hence finding larger consent among its users. The case of anti-vax conspiracy theories clearly shows how the Internet, and in particular social networks, have proved fundamental to the spread and development of such theories.
