ABSTRACT
Under the global pandemic, the webinar has become a popular tool of digital communication to reach global audiences. Aimed at shedding light on how misinformation affects diasporic political communication, this chapter investigates how Syrian pro-democracy activists and diasporic political entrepreneurs use the webinar to counter mis/disinformation and conspiracies about Syria. During the Covid-19 pandemic, alignment between conspiracy narratives on both the far right and the left became stronger, forming a so-called red-brownist alignment (Bevensee, 2020). These narratives include anti-vaccination arguments and mis/disinformation about Syria. In August 2020, a webinar series entitled Common Sense on Syria, by Just World Educational (JWE), provided a platform for communicating misinformation narratives about Syria, which Yassin al-Haj Saleh calls a ‘top-down anti-imperialist discourse’ (al-Haj Saleh, 2021). Syrian diaspora actors countered with another webinar series, The Syrian Revolution: A History from Below, to unpack the root causes and context of the Syrian revolution. Through the method of discourse analysis, with the webinar as unit of analysis, this chapter unpacks the discursive structures and narrative intentions of these two webinar series, which represent polar positions on the spectrum between conspiracy theories, mis/disinformation and fact-based opinions about Syria.
