ABSTRACT
The pandemic has become an ideal opportunity for conspiracy theories (CTs): on the origin of the virus (artificial), its purpose (eugenics, totalitarian surveillance, criminal greed), its modes of transmission (accident, bacteriological warfare, 5G technology, chemtrails), data on the infected and deceased, its prevention (negative: the harmfulness of vaccines), its cure, its side effects. WHO authorities spoke specifically of infodemic before certifying the pandemic (when it only had epidemic dimensions but was already causing information disorders). CTs are mythologies of modernity (Popper): they do not resort to supernatural beings, but assume that certain key events are due to a plan, secretly concocted by a small group of very powerful entities. In this chapter, we review the conspiracy tradition and its pathological forms and describe those circulating about the health crisis. To do this, we will select some specific texts from widely distributed press (Daily Mail and New York Post) to official newspapers (the Chinese People’s Daily) and from well-known conspiratorial websites to some celebrity Twitter feed, which synthesize a sort of narrative on the origin, purpose and consequences of the plandemic. The conclusions point to the continuity of conspiratorial rhetoric dating back several centuries and to the fact that the current CTs related to the pandemic fulfill all the formal features of the subgenre, but also highlight that they are enhanced by the new algorithmically driven information disorder.
