Special Issue: Conspiracy Theories in Digital Environments

Convergence: The International

Journal of Research into
Deep state phobia: Narrative New Media Technologies
2022, Vol. 28(4) 1214–1238
convergence in coronavirus © The Author(s) 2022
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
conspiracism on Instagram DOI: 10.1177/13548565221118751
journals.sagepub.com/home/con

Marc Tuters 
Universiteit van Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Tom Willaert 
Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium

Abstract
Recent scholarship has established that conspiracist narratives proliferated in mainstream online
discourse during the coronavirus pandemic. This proliferation has been provocatively characterized as
a ‘conspiracy singularity’ in which previously divergent conspiracy narratives converged into a single,
overarching narrative. Yet while the idea of narrative convergence has long figured in conspiracy
theory research, empirical evidence has been scarce. The present article aims to address this gap by
means of an investigation of an archive containing over 470,000 conspiracy-related Instagram posts
from 2020. Given the size and conceptual complexity of the dataset, the paper introduces a ‘digital
hermeneutics’ approach, which combines data science methods with qualitative interpretation and
theorization. Operating across three levels of observation (hashtag analysis, text analysis, and image
analysis) we identify patterns of convergence among different conspiracy narratives (including anti-vax,
QAnon, anti-5G, and ‘The Great Reset’) over the year 2020 as well as the apparent role of pro-
tagonists and antagonists (notably Donald Trump and Bill Gates) in creating connections. In inter-
preting these findings we focus on the concept of ‘the Deep State’ as a bridge between various
conspiracist narratives, which seems to cut diagonally across political ideologies.

Keywords
digital hermeneutics, narrative convergence, conspiracist metanarratives, multimodal analysis,
coronavirus, QAnon, Bill Gates, The Great Reset

Introduction
Starting in the spring of 2020, a series of reports accused Instagram of circulating COVID-19
misinformation (Dickson, 2021; Hern, 2021). Prior to the pandemic, the image sharing platform had

Corresponding author:
Marc Tuters, Universiteit van Amsterdam, Turfdraagsterpad 9, rm 2.14, Amsterdam 1012 VT, Netherlands.
Email: M.D.Tuters@uva.nl
Tuters and Willaert 1215

been perceived as relatively innocent, at least when compared with its parent company Facebook’s
status as an ‘anti-social’ aggregator of ‘fake news’ (Vaidhyanathan, 2018). Yet over the course of the
year, Instagram too would come to be seen as a hotbed of conspiracy theorizing, particularly in the
U.S., where the coronavirus pandemic took a heavy toll due in part to the Trump administration’s
mishandling of mitigation measures (Snyder, 2021). By the fall of that year, Instagram had become
associated with the repackaging of the notorious ‘QAnon’ conspiracy theory in the visual language
of social media influencers, often featuring motivational quotations in soft pastel colors (Argentino,
2021). Initially spun from a series of posts on the anonymous 4chan message board several years
earlier, QAnon had proliferated across social media already in 2019 (Zeeuw et al., 2020), where it
formed the basis of a conspiracist narrative centered on suspicion of ‘the Deep State’ and
championing Donald Trump. With these observations in mind, this article explores the dynamics of
narrative convergence through which apparent innovations in conspiracism, such as the Deep State
narrative, developed on Instagram over the course of 2020.
Defined in the literature as “proposed explanations for events or practices that refute established
accounts and instead refer to secret machinations of influential people or institutions action for their
own benefit” (Mahl et al., 2021: 1), online conspiracy theories and their dynamics are currently active
areas of research across many fields. Although recent empirical research shows that conspiracy
theories are a relatively constant feature in American communications media (Parent and Usinski,
2014), it is nevertheless often argued that the abundance of online information has had a significant
effect on the “intensely active interpretative practices” of conspiracy theorists (Fenster, 2008: 103).
Moreover, the coronavirus ‘Infodemic’ in particular was found to have supercharged the online
proliferation of conspiracy theories (Stolper, 2020). Indeed, some popular interpretations even suggest
that during the pandemic, numerous previously distinct or divergent conspiracy theories have con-
verged into a single, overarching narrative: a ‘conspiracy singularity’ (Merlan, 2020). This evocative
image speaks to an underlying tendency amongst conspiracy theorists toward making connections
between narratives. As has been extensively discussed in the literature, this process, which has often
been found to span multiple decades, frequently leads to the emergence of overarching metanarratives
that posit all-powerful actors (Knight, 2003). Considering that 2020 was also an election year in the
U.S., in which the incumbent was a known conspiracy theorist (Hellinger, 2019), we arguably have all
the conditions for an intensified conspiracy convergence. To that end, one phenomenon remarked upon
in anti-lockdown protests during this period was the emergence of a “diagonalist” movement that cut
across right-wing and left-wing political ideologies (Calison and Slobodian, 2021: np). Through
empirical analysis of social media data collected during the pandemic, in what follows we consider
how shared antagonism toward perceived arch-conspirators like Bill Gates and suspicions about a
nefarious Deep State may help account for what brings together these strange bedfellows.
Empirically, the objective of this article is to find evidence of a proverbial conspiracy ‘sin-
gularity’ on Instagram around the time of the 2020 coronavirus outbreak (a period marked by
intensive spread of conspiracy theories). We pursue this goal by means of an analysis of an archive
of Instagram posts collected from a seed of hashtags and accounts associated with conspiracy
theories that were prevalent around the time of the coronavirus pandemic. We position our approach
within the emerging framework of ‘digital hermeneutics’ (Romele et al., 2020), which seeks to
combine (big) data analysis with interpretative methods from the humanities. For one thing, this
means that our analysis benefits from the opportunities offered by web scraping and quantitative
methods to empirically map and study conspiracist narratives as expressed through hashtags, texts,
and images. For another, this approach allows us to firmly ground our data-driven analysis in new
media studies, in particular a line of research that is concerned with how online platforms and their
subcultural communities help shape new modes of (linguistic) expression (Peeters et al., 2021).
1216 Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 28(4)

In the recent media studies literature, it has specifically been argued that misinformation and
conspiracy theory can be considered as epiphenomena related to the way that social media platforms
tend to valorize sensationalistic content (Marres, 2018). Likewise, it has been suggested that
conspiracy theories like QAnon and Pizzagate may be considered as epistemological “adaptations”
to (social) media environments that often privilege that which is memorable, repeatable and
shocking (Venturini, 2022: 1). Out of these assertions emerges an image of platforms as a kind of
growth medium for conspiracy theories. Starting from this provocative thesis, we hypothesize that
(1) over the course of the 2020 outbreak, the pandemic progressively acted as a catalyst for the
coming-together of previously more distinct conspiracy communities and narratives, of which we
expect to find a great diversity when examining actual empirical data. We further propose that (2)
this coming-together is animated by shared antagonists and protagonists in a broader drama framed
both by concerns around the pandemic as well as by U.S. party politics. In order to test these
assumptions, we presume that (A) the use of certain terms—either as hashtags or elsewhere in the
contents of posts—may be taken as signals of discrete narratives and that (B) we might be able to
identify a process of “overlapping” between conspiracist narratives over the course of time—the
latter which we refer to as ‘metanarratives.’

Data collection
In order to validate our hypotheses, we analyze a dataset of 478,154 Instagram posts collected by
means of the Instaloader Python library (Instaloader, 2021). These data were collected on the basis
of a seed of 82 primarily English language hashtags related to conspiracies prevalent at the time of
the coronavirus pandemic determined by a team of domain experts writing a book on the topic of
COVID-19 conspiracy narratives (Figure 1), and from the accounts of 66 accounts that frequently
posted using similar hashtags—many with followers counts in the tens and hundreds of thousands,
even one in the millions. In compiling this seed list, our aim was to capture a representative sample
of online conspiracist responses to COVID-19 on Instagram—primarily, though not exclusively,
focused on Anglo-American content. Since most of the seedlist hashtags are recent vernacular
innovations, one might assume that they would return a quite narrow sample, when used to query
Instagram’s API. Significantly, we find that the posts in our dataset commonly used a dozen or more
hashtags each. As an example of this practice of ‘hashtag stuffing,’ the following list of hashtags
comes from a single post, picked more or less at random from amongst the top most engaged with
content in the dataset, in this case a cartoon image of Bill Gates: #agenda2030, #control, #pop-
ulationcontrol, #depopulation, #freemarket, #agenda30, #truth, #corruption, #agenda21, #nwo,
#rothchild [sic], #rockafella, #newworldorder, #corona, #coronavirus, #covid, #covid_19,
#covid19, #event201, #wedonotconsent, #vaccines, #antivaxx, #alternativemedicine, #antivaccine,
#virus, #viruses. Given the number of posts that we collected, our starting points were thus
overshadowed by the plentitude of connections contained in each post. That said, assembling an
exhaustive dataset of every conspiratorial post for the period under investigation was not the
objective, not least because of the inexactness of the very concept of conspiracy theory. Given the
platform’s vast size and global reach, our dataset is only an entrypoint into the multiple worlds of
conspiracism on Instagram.
For each post, we retained the hashtags and the full text of the post description. We ran the script
at four points across 2020: in mid-May, at the end of June, at the end of August, and at the end of
October. By concatenating these data we created a single corpus of 707,203 posts. This resulted in a
historically unique archive, since Instagram is known to have removed a large numbers of accounts
deemed as conspiracist in late 2020. As our analysis focuses on Q1 through Q3, this ‘deplatforming’
Tuters and Willaert 1217

Figure 1. Seed list of conspiratorial hashtags used for data collection. These hashtags were sourced from a
selection of seemingly conspiracist-oriented Instagram posts, at the height of the pandemic in May of 2020.

is not visible in our data collection. However, upon verification, we found a substantial number of
the posts discussed below to have been permanently deleted—as well as a third of the accounts—in
what amounts to a radical erasure of the archival record for this controversial period on the platform.
Against this context, we offer the analysis below as evidence of how, during the height of the
pandemic, Instagram effectively functioned as a medium for the growth and spread of conspiracist
narratives.
1218 Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 28(4)

While social media platforms had already come under fire for amplifying extremist conspiracy
theories prior to the pandemic (Phillips, 2018), our study appears to corroborate the claim that the
pandemic acted as a catalyst for an even greater mainstreaming of conspiracist narratives (Stolper,
2020). Importantly, it should be noted that on October 4th of 2020, amidst attempts to manage the
spread of misinformation on the platform, Instagram adjusted their API making it much more
challenging for social media researchers to collect data from the platform. As relatively fewer posts
were consequently scraped from Instagram for Q4 of 2020, data from this quarter were therefore
mostly omitted from the analysis. For the purposes of the present investigation, we thus focus on a
set of 478,154 posts from the first three quarters of 2020, with Q1 (January–March) marking the
period leading up to the global coronavirus pandemic, Q2 (April–June) marking the actual outbreak
of the pandemic, and Q3 (July–September) the first months into the pandemic. In addition to posts,
we also used Instaloader to collect a dataset of 31,752 associated images.
As illustrated in Figure 2, the content retrieved from our seed query of hashtags and accounts
dates back as far as 2011. Though a segment of the hashtag narratives retrieved thus predate the
pandemic, we focus our efforts mainly on the year 2020. During this time, the pandemic evolved
from a local crisis in Wuhan to into a global public health emergency. Although Instagram is more
typically associated with images and identity rather than narratives and politics, the platform
nonetheless came to be described as a conspiracy theory “hotbed” during the pandemic (Bell, 2020:
np). Journalists and scholars noted for instance that, between January and August 2020, interactions
and video views generated by QAnon-related Instagram accounts significantly outperformed other
trending hashtags such as “MeToo” or “BlackLivesMatter” (Bloom and Moskalenko, 2021: 44).
One possible explanation for QAnon’s success on Instagram is that the platform’s image sharing
affordances spoke more directly to the emotions and identities than galvanized the QAnon narrative
at this stage of its development (Bloom and Moskalenko, 2021: 71). Another factor to consider is the
dynamics of social media ‘influence’ in the circulation and amplification of disinformation and
conspiracy theories online (Phillips, 2018), where Instagram has been and arguably remains the

Figure 2. Daily number of Instagram posts and comments.

Tuters and Willaert 1219

dominant platform for studying an ‘attention economy’ of influence, in which status is based on
page views and clicks (Marwick, 2015).
Specifically, over the course of 2020, researchers observed the emergence of a female demo-
graphic of Instagram accounts who were drawn into QAnon through a narrative that imagined
wealthy establishment ‘elites’ as secretly engaged in ‘ritual child abuse,’ which connected to an
early pro-Trump conspiracy theory known as ‘Pizzagate’ (Robb, 2017; Argentino, 2021). Although
these narratives were false, they frequently contained the kernel of a genuinely disturbing reality, as,
for example, in the outrage over the case of Jeffrey Epstein, the American financier with ties to
establishment figures—including the Clintons—who for years evaded justice for his serial sexual
abuse, only to die in prison under seemingly mysterious circumstances (Cassidy, 2019). As this
study shows, these and many other (often disturbing) narratives forged connections, which can be
detected across multiple scales, from the image content of the posts and their textual descriptions, to
the hashtags that are used to literally connect posts into larger conversations.

Methodology
Taking a descriptive stance to online conspiracy theories, our study aims to integrate data analysis
with interpretative practices from the humanities. As such, we draw inspiration from the framework
of ‘digital hermeneutics’ (Gerbaudo, 2016; Romele et al., 2020). As illustrated by its previous
applications to the study of political opinion by Romele et al. (2020), this framework comprises a
layered approach to social media data that opens up different levels of interpretation. It first
distinguishes a level of “mass opinion,” where a volume of social media posts (e.g. tweets) are
counted or analyzed using statistical methods in order to infer (mass) political preference (Romele
et al., 2020: 80). A second level is that of “latent opinion,” where more advanced methods for
sentiment mining or automated text analysis are operationalized to infer political sentiment from the
posts’ actual contents (Romele et al., 2020: 80). Finally, on the level of “interaction,” posts are
studied in their wider context, for instance, through network analysis, in order to map the “activated”
political opinion (Romele et al., 2020: 80). Opening up similar perspectives on our Instagram
dataset, this section will move on to examine the overall preference or support for conspiracist
narratives on Instagram by plotting the frequencies of posts that use conspiratorial Instagram
hashtags or that were sent from known conspiratorial accounts. Our in-depth analysis then proceeds
to map, contextualize and interpret the convergence of issues (as marked by co-occurring hashtags)
into metanarratives, and to examine the role of the named entities that appear in the Instagram posts.
Further integrating ‘big data’ analysis with interpretation, the working definition of narratives
used in this paper is derived from recent work in the computational analysis of online conspiracy
theories. This work has found that conspiracy theories have strong narrative foundations, in which
an “endemic reservoir of narrative frameworks” creates connections between members of otherwise
disparate groups (Shahsavari et al., 2020: 3, also see Tangherlini et al., 2020). Inspired by these
computational approaches, which employ a dynamic schema of relationships between ‘actant-
s’(including people, organizations, ideas), we conceptualize conspiracist narratives as comprising
core motifs, themes and memes as represented by hashtags (such as “depopulation” or “plandemic”)
and orientations toward heroes and enemies (named entities such as “Trump” and “Gates”).
1220 Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 28(4)

Findings
Hashtag analysis
On Instagram, one of the more explicit ways in which users can express their support for a certain
narrative is through hashtags. Such new media affordances as the hashtag have been theorized as the
basis of a profound historical transformation toward more “flexible” and “personalized” forms of
political engagement (Bennett and Segerberg, 2012: 744). Indeed, digital methods research on
Instagram treats such hashtags as markers of distinct political discussions or of an “issue space”
(Rogers, 2021: 6). In the context of presumedly conspiratorial discourse, it is be fruitful to consider
hashtags constitutive role in broader ‘political narratives’ (Patterson and Monroe, 1998), in this case
compelling stories about the way that the world actually works, set against a broader context of
extreme polarization and even existential uncertainty. In looking for empirical traces of convergence
between such conspiracist narratives, we thus start off at digital hermeneutics’ ‘mass opinion’ scale
by seeking to detect patterns connecting across all hashtags in the corpus. Our relevant hypothesis
here is that when two otherwise distinct hashtags appear together in a single post, this may indicate a
confluence of narratives.

General clusters and dynamics

Below, we graph the hashtag co-occurrences in the data as representation of the growth and
convergence of conspiracist narratives over the course of the first three quarters of 2020 (Figure 3).
In these graphs, hashtags are represented as nodes, and an edge is drawn between two nodes when
the corresponding hashtags co-occur in the same post. Following the digital hermeneutics approach
of combining data analysis with theorization, we then proceeded to use domain expertise to
manually assign nodes to overarching conspiracist narratives (or metanarratives). Because Insta-
gram users often combine multiple hashtags in their post descriptions (a phenomenon that can be
referred to as ‘hashtag stuffing’), our initial seed of hashtags yielded a set of additional, co-occurring
hashtags. While many of these were not ‘conspiratorial’ per se, they were manually clustered based
on topical similarity in an effort to identify traces of convergence. In the resulting graphs in Figure 3,
we thus plot the co-occurrence networks of the hashtags for the first three quarters of 2020, color-
coded into seven ‘metanarratives’: Trump/QAnon (blue), Pizzagate (purple), Conspirituality (or-
ange), NWO/New World Order (yellow), Covid (green), Bill Gates (red), and 5G (brown). By this
method, we can thus see metanarratives appear to grow and overlap as new hashtags appear and
shared hashtags draw them together. Finally, we visually compared the graphs for the first three
quarters of our dataset in order to examine the potential convergence between narratives over time.
The co-occurrence networks of the hashtags across the first three quarters of 2020 provide an
overview of the diversity and scope of conspiracist narratives on Instagram. For one thing, we can
observe a large number of very popular Trump-related hashtags in the networks. The top ten most
used hashtags in our dataset over the first three quarters of 2020 are: “wwg1wga,” “qanon,”
“thegreatawakening,” “obamagate,” “pizzagate,” “deepstate,” “newworldorder,” “q,” “billgates,”
“maga.” What we find is that all of these hashtags except for “bill gates” and possibly “new-
worldorder” are phrases directly connected with Trump or his followers. The blue cluster at the
bottom of the graph is made up of hashtags related to the partisan slogans of the antagonistic
populist political style associated with Trumpism (e.g., “Trump2020,” “MAGA”). Interestingly
however, the most commonly used hashtags at the center of this cluster are related to QAnon (e.g.,
“thegreatawakening,” “wwg1wga”). We can surmise from this observation that, during the 2020
 Tuters and Willaert

Figure 3. Side-by-side graphs of hashtag co-occurrences in posts from the dataset in the first three quarters of 2020. The graphs were generated using the
Force Atlas 2 layout algorithm in Gephi (Jacomy et al., 2014), with the size of the node labels representing the number of posts that contain the hashtag in the
description. Colored regions correspond to a manual categorization of nodes. Image design produced by Gabriele Colombo.
1221
1222 Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 28(4)

U.S. presidential election, QAnon became central to Trumpism. While QAnon did to some extent
internationalize in the course of 2020 (Gallagher et al. 2020; Callison W and Slobodian), the
hashtags that make up this large blue cluster nevertheless give a sense of overall the prominence of
right-wing American politics in this dataset, and conversely the presence of conspiracism in right-
wing American politics at this point in time. Furthermore, this cluster is marked by its parochialism,
focusing narrowly on Trump and QAnon, while other clusters can be seen to overlap with other
narratives. That this cluster appears to remain comparatively stable across the three quarters,
suggests that QAnon was also already well established on Instagram prior to the pandemic. We may
interpret this as empirical proof of Instagram’s importance in developing and amplifying the QAnon
movement—evidence which the platform has since set out to erase from the historical record.
We also coded a purple cluster made up of hashtags related to the child trafficking and pedophilia
narrative (e.g., “savethechildren,” “pedogate,” “adrenochrome”), which appears above as a subset
of the aforementioned blue cluster. As mentioned earlier, prior research into conspiracism on
Instagram proposed that this narrative exploded on the platform in the fall of 2020. We call this the
Pizzagate cluster, in reference to the conspiracy theory that predated QAnon and which initially
developed much of its central narrative of ritual child abuse, via the coordinated efforts of ‘re-
searchers’ on 4chan at the time of the previous US presidential election (Tuters et al., 2018). These
hashtags do indeed appear as a more dynamic network within the larger QAnon movement, al-
though the growth in Q2 occurs earlier than has previously been reported, which suggest that the
narrative had quite some time to consolidate relatively unobserved. Finally, with regards to QAnon,
we see that COVID-19–related hashtags, both neutral and conspiratorial (“lockdown,” “plan-
demic,” “filmyourhospital”) occur primarily in the top half of the graph, relatively isolated from
both Pizzagate and QAnon-related hashtags. This is a remarkable finding as it contrasts with claims
of earlier research that the use of hashtags related to Covid mitigation measures had energized the
QAnon movement (Bloom and Moskalenko, 2021: 149–174). Taken together, these two clusters
suggest that the QAnon movement was energized by Trump as well as by a resuscitated version of
the earlier narrative of Pizzagate.
If the hashtags in the bottom half of the hashtag graph may all be understood as essentially
relating to the broader QAnon narrative, then those hashtags at the top of the graph might point
toward a relatively distinct conspiracist narrative. Earlier reporting on QAnon’s presence on In-
stagram made much of its overlaps with supposedly more ‘feminine’ New Age concerns—a
convergence that had already been termed ‘conspirituality’ some years earlier (Ward and Voas,
2011). Having used this term to label hashtags in the orange cluster (“mindcontrol,” “ques-
tioneverything,” “awakening”), in contrast to the prior research we find little overlap with QAnon.
Instead, we find overlaps with the green Covid cluster and the yellow NWO/New World Order
cluster, the latter related to conspiratorial theories concerning global governance (“newworldorder,”
“illuminati,” “event201”). Additionally, at the top of the graph is a brown 5G cluster (“stop5g,”
“5gkills,” “radiation”), which gradually becomes engulfed by the Covid cluster. This supports the
interpretation that pre-existing concerns around 5G became connected with COVID-19 in 2020
(Bruns et al., 2020). Last, we have the red Bill Gates cluster (“fuckbillgates,” “billgatesisevil,”
“saynotobillgates”), which unlike any of the others remarkably appears out of nowhere in Q2. The
dramatic emergence of Bill Gates in our dataset seems to provide initial evidence for our hypothesis
concerning the role of shared antagonists in the process of narrative convergence.
By Q3, all of the clusters in the top of the graph—in distinction to those related to QAnon at the
bottom—appear to have become more integrated with one another, with hashtags for ‘the New
World Order’ forming their core. Although the term ‘New World Order’ has long been used by anti-
semitic conspiracy theorists (see, for instance, Goodrick-Clarke, 2003: 279–302), arguably, we may
Tuters and Willaert 1223

Figure 4. Core of QAnon and The Great Reset in Q3. Closeup on image designed by Gabriele Colombo.

refer to this apparent convergence of narratives as ‘The Great Reset’ metanarrative. Originally taken
from the name of the World Economic Forum’s 50th annual meeting (Schwab and Malleret, 2020),
as a conspiracist metanarrative, the Great Reset imagines the coronavirus pandemic as part of a
secret plan to impose global governance on the part of “the globalists, the world economic elite”
(Mercola and Cummins, 2021: 103). Involving speculations about IT (including “rfidchip” and
“5G”) as technologies of “populationcontrol,” the metanarrative also frames “vaccination” as a
corporate strategy to replace individual rights with a mass surveillance regime—orchestrated by the
“illuminati.” The Great Reset thus appears to make a conspiracy theory by combining bits and
pieces of long established right-wing conspiracy narratives with leftist critiques of ‘globalist’
corporations conspiring to advance a neoliberal economic agenda (Slobodian, 2018)—a point to
which we will return in the discussion below.
In general, our analysis of hashtag co-occurrences suggests an increased connectivity between
pre-existing conspiracist narratives around the time of the outbreak of the pandemic in Q2. Sig-
nificantly, our graph for Q2 reveals a dramatic multiplication of covid-related hashtags, which seems
mirrored by the sudden appearance of predominantly antagonistic Bill Gates–related hashtags.
While antagonistic discourse about Bill Gates likewise predates the dataset under investigation, this
finding supports the claim of previous researchers concerning “the emergence of ‘Bill Gates’ as a
key actor” with the coronavirus outbreak (Shahsavari et al., 2020: 298). Indeed, our subsequent
findings situate Bill Gates at the intersection of a broad range of conspiracist narratives, for which
we consider some possible explanations below.

QAnon and the Great Reset

When comparing QAnon and the Great Reset as relatively discrete conspiracist narratives we see a
number of differences. There is a tonal difference here between the fantasy element that underlies
many of the QAnon hashtags. More stable over time, the QAnon narrative has featured more of its
own hashtags which function as rabbit holes into a broader interconnected narrative. Often based on
references to fantasy literature (“followthewhiterabbit,” “adrenochrome”) or film (“redpill,”
“wwg1wga”) these hashtags have the quality of seeming to be part of a scripted narrative, as many
1224 Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 28(4)

Figure 5. Narrative convergence in Instagram imagery. Image by Anonymous.

have observed of QAnon more generally (Thompson, 2020). By contrast, on Instagram the Great
Reset appears to be anchored by the long pre-existing conspiracist narratives about global gov-
ernance (“NWO,” “illuminati,” “markofthebeast”), which in turn seem to speak to a more diverse set
of concerns centering on COVID-19 (“plandemic,” “covidhoax”), technology (“5G,” “rfid”) and
what we might call technocracy (“event201,” “id2020,” “agenda21”).
Figure 4 also illustrates how the narrative of the Great Reset gains consistency as formerly
relatively distinct narratives overlap. Anchored by the yellow NWO (New World Order) cluster, by
Q3 the Great Reset includes anti-vax hashtags, anti-5G hashtags, and anti–Bill Gates hashtags. At its
core, the Great Reset is a conspiracist interpretation of actually existing plans for global
governance—for example, “id2020” refers to an NGO advocating digital identity for undocumented
people, “agenda21” refers to a UN resolution for sustainable growth and “event201” refers to a pre–
COVID-19 pandemic exercise funded by the Gates Foundation. As with the term ‘the Great Reset’
itself, what we find then is a conspiratorial reading of existing governance initiatives. In some cases,
we can literally see this convergence figured in the Instagram image posts themselves, for example,
in Figure 5, which presents a triangle of Big Tech, Big Science and Big Pharma, respectively,
connected with “total surveillance,” “economic devastation,” and “neurological damage,” within
which is a Venn diagram of 5G, the coronavirus and vaccines at the overlapping center of all three is
“depopulation.” In the comments on the post we can see the prominence of both Christian religious
and New Age interpretations with reference to both “lucifer” and “the love inside you.”
The patterns of hashtag co-occurrences described in this section seem to present the Great Reset
as a more dynamic and multi-issue metanarrative than QAnon/Pizzagate, which furthermore ap-
pears surprisingly insulated from the pandemic-related concerns. In contrast to the largely right-
wing American QAnon, the Great Reset seems both more international as well as more ideologically
diverse. There is however one significant overlap, the “deepstate” hashtag in Figure 6, which
Tuters and Willaert 1225

Figure 6. Centrality of “deepstate” in the entire network in Q2 and Q3. Closeup on image designed by
Gabriele Colombo.

actually moves from the core of the QAnon cluster to become a bridging node between the two
metanarratives. The concept of the Deep State, to which it refers, first emerged in Turkey, a country
with a long history of coups, as a term for a parallel government of bureaucrats and military officials
that exert influence on the elected government later to be used in the American context by the noted
conspiracy theorist and Trump supporter Alex Jones (Den Bulk and Hyzen, 2019; Gingeras, 2010).
In fact, noted scholars have even gone so far as to claim that, while “continuities persist [with]
similar theories of the past […] the Deep State narrative is unique to the Trump era” (Phillips and
Milner, 2021: 12). Whether or not this claim is historically correct, it certainly speaks to the
centrality of the “deepstate” hashtag within our dataset—and perhaps to the concept of the Deep
State more generally, in the post-Trump era. In order to triangulate these findings, however, we need
to move beyond the level of hashtags. Following the multi-layered ‘digital hermeneutics’ approach
proposed in Romele et al. (2020), we therefore also consider the actual contents of the Instagram
posts, that is, post descriptions and images.

Text analysis
Typically, ‘digital methods’ work on the level of structured objects, such as hashtags or hyperlinks
(Rogers, 2013). As was already explained earlier, mapping the co-occurrences of conspiratorial
hashtags on Instagram leads to high-level insights about the convergence between metanarratives.
However, we argue that in addition to hashtags or images, the study of online conspiracy theories
can also gain a lot from examining the actual full text of an Instagram post, that is, the written
description that accompanies an image or video. As mentioned above, this is the scale of analysis
referred to as ‘latent opinion’ (Romele et al., 2020: 80). For the purposes of our ‘narratological’
analysis of texts on Instagram, we operationalize the NLP technique of named entity recognition
(NER) to computationally identify co-occurring names of persons and organizations mentioned in
post descriptions. Conceptually, this method recalls structuralist approaches to story analysis, in
which the relations among named entities filling in specific roles or ‘actants,’ make up the core
structure of a narrative. As was recently demonstrated by Tangherlini et al. (2020), networks plotting
1226 Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 28(4)

the interaction between such entities can yield insight into the deeper structures and dynamics of
conspiratorial narratives and conspiracies. Building on our earlier observations, our hypothesis here
is that in conspiracist Instagram posts, certain actors will take up more central positions in the
networks, either as protagonists (e.g., Donald Trump) or as antagonists (e.g., Bill Gates) of distinct
narratives.
In order to plot the co-occurrence networks of the key actors in our dataset, we first extracted
named entities from the Instagram data using the spaCy natural language processing library in
Python (spaCy, 2021). We then proceeded to clean up the retrieved entities, removing any noise
resulting from the model, and manually classified the most frequently occurring persons and
organizations into categories such as government officials, politicians, or Hollywood actors using a
bottom-up coding scheme (DMI, 2021). Finally, we represented the co-occurrences of entities in the
2020 dataset as a graph using Gephi. Here we assume that if two or more entities are mentioned in a
single post, a meaningful relation between these entities exists, and a corresponding edge can be
drawn between both entity nodes. Correspondingly, an actor’s shifting position in the overall
networks over time might provide meaningful insights into that actor’s role in bringing diverging
conspiracist narratives together.

Figure 7. (a, b). Aggregated overview of organizations and persons mentioned in conspiracy-related
Instagram posts (2011–2020). Visualizations designed by Cristina Pita da Veiga.
Tuters and Willaert 1227

Figure 7. Continued.

Figure 8. Co-occurrence networks of named entities in Instagram post descriptions (2020). Image designed
by Gabriele Colombo.
1228 Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 28(4)

The graphs in Figure 7 show aggregated overviews of the persons and organizations mentioned
in the textual descriptions of our full dataset of conspiracy-related Instagram posts (2011–2020).
While seeming to represent a broad-ranging conversation that goes well beyond the starting point of
our hashtags, we can find a general pattern of fear of the ‘Deep State,’ which manifests as an-
tagonism toward multinational institutions and ‘globalist’ individuals. When we examine the most
frequently mentioned organizations, we find that most of them are state and governmental entities,
(e.g., “senate,” “state,” “pentagon”), big tech companies (e.g., “Amazon,” “Google,” “Microsoft,”
and “Facebook”), big pharma companies (“Big Pharma,” “Johnson and Johnson,” “[Bill and]
Melinda Gates Foundation”), or media organizations. Among the most frequently mentioned
persons, “Trump” and “Bill Gates” stand out. Additionally we find names of perceived opponents of
Trump (“Hilary,” “Obama,” “Joe Biden”) as well as figures associated with conspiracy theory either
as authors and proponents (“Judy Moskowitz,” “David Icke,” “David K Miller”) or as key an-
tagonists (“Tom Hanks,” “Oprah,” “George Soros,” “Anthony Fauci”).
The co-occurrence networks of named entities over the year 2020 (Figure 8) display dynamics of
convergence that reflect some of the patterns that we identified in our hashtag analysis. One salient
observation here is the centrality of the figure of Donald Trump, who appears to be discussed
alongside religious entities (“god,” “jesus”). As the year progresses, we also see Trump’s perceived
Deep State opponents move from the periphery increasingly toward the center (e.g., “george soros,”
“epstein,” “clinton,” “rothschilds,” “rockefeller,” and “bill gates”). Here the ‘us vs them’ antag-
onism of right-wing populism of conspiracism and of anti-semitism share a similar “narrative as
felt,” or “deep story” (Hochschild, 2016: ix). We may interpret this as additional evidence that while
Deep State narratives existed before the pandemic, there was a confluence in 2020 as entities
became more interconnected. This is most clearly visible around the time of the initial outbreak of
the pandemic (between Q1 and Q2), but what is also notable is that this interconnection remains in
place as it seems to become part of the U.S. election narrative.

Image analysis
Entities and celebrities
Some images in our dataset also contain striking examples of narrative convergence. The picture in
Figure 12 for instance brings together otherwise relatively distinct concerns about 5G and vaccines
with New World Order and chemtrails conspiracy theories. To help us identify such traces of
convergence in our dataset of 31,752 images, we used methods from the field of computer vision
offered through the Google Vision API (Vision AI, n.d.). Specifically, we used the entity extraction
endpoint to computationally extract a list of all ‘entities’ (such as objects or persons) that figure in
images, as well as the ‘celebrity detection’ endpoint to detect faces of well-known persons. Similar
to the aforementioned methods, we were particularly interested in detecting co-occurring actors or
entities in the dataset’s imagery. Additionally, subsets with images of interest (such as those
representing some lead antagonists) were identified with the help of the PixPlot image clustering
tool (PixPlot, 2021), and then further examined in a more qualitative manner. This technique for
‘reading’ Instagram posts at scale helped us to visually explore how conspiracy appeals to emotions
(e.g., through colors, recurring faces, etc.). While this pattern of emotional appeal has been re-
marked upon in the literature (Van Prooijen and Douglas, 2018), there is a relative paucity of
empirical evidence for how this works through the grammar of images.
Figure 9 shows a bipartite network representation of our image dataset for Q2 of 2020, where
nodes represent images and edges represent co-occurring entities. This visualization supports many
Tuters and Willaert 1229

Figure 9. Bipartite network visualization of the image dataset for Q2 of 2020, based on co-occurrences of
textual entities retrieved from the pictures. Image designed by Alessandra Facchin.

Figure 10. Celebrity faces in the 2020 Instagram dataset. The size of the blocks is proportional to the number
of images retrieved. Image designed by Alessandra Facchin.
1230 Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 28(4)

of the observations that were previously made on the basis of hashtags and post descriptions. On the
left-hand side of the image we see a Bill Gates cluster with edges connecting to images containing
the word “microsoft” and “vaccines,” as well as to a somewhat lesser degree with edges connecting
to images containing the words “george soros,” “fauci” and “epstein.” Once again, but now at a
different layer of analysis, we see that certain named entities function as a kind of “boundary object”
that is shared by different communities, and that is “plastic enough to adapt to local needs and
constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity
across sites” (Star and Griesemer, 1989: 393). Although Bill Gates forms the largest cluster, the most
central boundary object in this network is “epstein,” in reference to the aforementioned Jeffrey
Epstein. Connecting Bill Gates with Clinton and QAnon, the centrality of Epstein is consistent with
the observed emergence of the Pizzagate narrative around Q2 in the above hashtag analysis. Indeed,
Epstein featured as one of the central antagonists in this Pizzagate narrative. Also consistent with the
latter, Epstein connects into a network of Democratic politicians and organizations seen as con-
nected to the Deep State—indeed, the named entity “state” is amongst the largest clusters in the
network.1
Moving on from quantitative analysis of the text contained within the images to the images
themselves, celebrity face detection reveals that Bill Gates is the single most commonly occurring
celebrity in the image sample. This supports the previous findings concerning Gates’s role as leading
antagonist in conspiracist narratives (Figure 10). Unsurprisingly, given the prominence of
Trumpism in the above hashtag analysis, the other main figure that comes to the fore is Donald
Trump, the protagonist of the QAnon narrative. Among the other frequently detected faces, we
primarily find figures from American politics who fit into a Manichean narrative, either as members
of the globalist elite, like Bill Gates, or else as Trump allies. While it is clear that American politics,
particularly of a right-wing valence, are highly represented in this dataset, the face detection
technique also picks out major celebrities.

Bill Gates
Out of all three of our analyses (hashtags, texts and images), Bill Gates emerges as the most
significant single actor in the dataset in general and in the process of convergence in specific. Cast in
the role of a shared antagonist, Gates connects a diverse range of conspiracist narratives, and his
infamy only grows over time. Among the most reposted images in the dataset with the hashtag
“billgates,” Figure 11 is illustrative of this common pattern of convergence: it features Gates at the
intersection of various conspiracist narratives. The image is presented in the format of an ‘image
macro’ meme template, which includes a setup and punchline at the top and bottom taken from
American popular culture (Nissenbaum and Shifman, 2018). In this case the top and bottom of the
image feature an avuncular character known as ‘the Stranger’ from the cult film The Big Lebowski,
whose role is to comment on the absurdity of the narrative and to offer sage advice. In this case, the
Stranger meme template is used to seemingly comment on the real-life movie of Bill Gates’s career
as interpreted through the lens of conspiracism. The middle of the image presents five seemingly
unconnected claims based on Gates’s post-Microsoft investment career—big tech, big pharma, big
agriculture, geo-engineering, and contemporary art—that when taken together make Gates appear
as a villain.
Each of the claims in this image can be traced back to a hashtag or set of hashtags from the former
layer of analysis. This again supports the idea of Gates as a focal point of narrative convergence.
Gates’s investment in the biotech company Monsanto implies a plot to reduce the world’s food
supply and thus diminish its population (as exemplified by hashtags such as “depopulation,”
Tuters and Willaert 1231

Figure 11. Meme connecting Bill Gates to diverse conspiracy narratives, which was amongst the most
reposted in the dataset in posts using the hashtag #billgates. Image by Anonymous.
1232 Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 28(4)

“populationcontrol,” “depopulationagenda”). An image of a smiling Gates with a syringe and a

W.H.O. shirt connects him to anti-vaccination narratives that are highly prominent in the dataset.
Gates is furthermore connected with the narrative of Satanic pedophiles (“spiritcooking,” “the-
sepeoplearesick,” “podestaemails”), through his having “sponsored Marina Abromovic,” whose
artwork was at the center of the Pizzagate narrative (Tuters et al., 2018) as well as for his hubristic
“plans to block out the sun” (“geoengineeredsky”) and for having “advocated microchipping”
(“microchip,” “rfidchip,” “billgatesrfid”). While this is one example from a large collection of
similar images, this meme shows how Instagram works as a visual networked storytelling medium,
and how that affordance feeds into often bizarre conspiracist narratives—for example, about vaccine
microchipping, which while erroneous are often based on kernels of truth (cf EUvsDISINFO, 2021).

Discussion
Based on our findings, we may surmise that a substantial number of posts in this dataset exploited
Instagram’s inbuilt affordances to valorize content that receives high user engagement, toward the
end of circulating misinformation and conspiracism. Just as affordances are dynamic, on Instagram
the conditions for the growth and spread of conspiracism changed over the course of the year.
Especially following the Capitol insurrection, social media platforms became increasingly in-
hospitable to QAnon—as had been the case for ‘alt-right” content several years earlier, in the
aftermath of far-right street violence in Charlottesville, Virginia (Marantz, 2019: 262–274). It may
however have been easier for Instagram to remove the relatively coherent and interconnected
QAnon community from its platform than it was to deplatform hashtags associated with what we
have called the Great Reset metanarrative. While the QAnon narrative tended to exist in its own
discrete conspiratorial universe—on sites like 4chan and 8chan (Zeeuw et al., 2020)—conspiracist
discussions of the Great Reset thrived in the comments section of the World Economic Forum’s very
own publicity materials (Silverman and Lytvynenko, 2021). Although the Great Reset, in our
dataset, included several recognizably conspiratorial hashtags (such as “NWO” and “illuminati”)
many of its core themes (like “5G” and “agenda21”) only appear conspiratorial in associating with
this narrative, which is practically impossible to disentangle from ‘legitimate’ political economic
critiques of neoliberal globalization (see for instance Slobodian, 2018). From the perspective of
content moderation, conspiracist narratives of the Great Reset variety are thus potentially harder to
police since they blend in with otherwise unobjectionable content—even content that might
otherwise signify ‘healthy debate.’ We may thus surmise that, after the ‘fake news’ fiasco of the mid-
2010, perhaps the next content moderation problem will be one of fake critique. To that end, the
distinction between critiques that might be considered as ‘legitimate’ and those that would be
labeled as ‘fake’ or ‘conspiratorial’ is ultimately a matter of degree and not of kind.
When considering the reasons why Bill Gates emerged as the key antagonist in our dataset, it is
worth recalling his biography. Over the course of decades, Gates had acquired the status of the arch-
villain of the free software movement championed by computer hackers for his strategy of pri-
vatizing resources that others considered should be commonly shared (Streeter, 2011: 143). As-
tonishingly, this long-standing leftist critique was partially vindicated by the US federal government
when, in a 2001 antitrust case, Gates was forced to step down as CEO of Microsoft (United States v.
Microsoft Corp, 2001). In spite of his subsequent involvement in philanthropy, Gates’ reputation as
a contemporary ‘robber baron’ would however continue to grow, now spreading into other domains,
laying the groundwork for the perception of Gates as a profiteer (if not mastermind) of the pandemic.
As such, when Gates’s foundation funded a simulated pandemic outbreak exercise (known as ‘Event
201’) only month before the coronavirus outbreak, this seemed incontrovertible evidence of his
Tuters and Willaert 1233

Figure 12. Post from Instagram dataset creating connections between otherwise seemingly discrete narrative
domains. Image by Anonymous.

“New World Order” agenda to control the world’s population through a combination of vaccines,
new media technologies, and philanthropy (Mercola and Cummins, 2021: 31). Perhaps it is also
instructive here to consider a claim made by Tangherlini et al. (2020) that what distinguishes an
“actual conspiracy” from a “conspiracy theory” is the fact that former is limited to a “single domain
of human interaction,” whereas in the case of the latter “interpretations manifest as heretofore
unknown relationships (edges) between actants that cross domains” (Tangherlini et al., 2020: 4). In
light of this claim, it could also be that Bill Gates’s own unique career of cross-domain philanthropic
investment may have paradoxically set him up to become a scapegoat for subsequent conspiracy-
minded researchers simply attempting to connect the dots.
While the recent research on online conspiracism has tended to focus on American-centric right-
wing variants, one of the stories associated with the pandemic has been the emergence of so-called
‘diagonalist’ movements, which seem to have created tenuous connections across the political
spectrum (Callison and Slobodian, 2021). Consider, for example, Figure 12, an image from our
dataset that includes the hashtags “#FucktheGoverment,” “#FuckBillGates,” and “#FuckTrump,” in
which an anarchist ‘black bloc’ protester confronting the police is overlaid with the conspiratorial
theme of NWO, 5G, vaccines, chips, and chemtrails. Particularly in some parts of Europe, most
notably in Germany, protests against coronavirus mitigation measures seem to have radicalized
parts of the libertarian left—also including alternative health enthusiasts—into conspiracy theorists.
Here, it has been argued that aspects of a critique of neoliberalism confusingly align with the ideal
subject of neoliberalism seeking to defend their “personal sovereignty” (Bialasiewicz and
Muehlenhoff, 2020). What are the conceptual underpinnings of this diagonalist convergence?
1234 Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 28(4)

Our findings indicate at least one shared theme cutting diagonally across our entire Instagram
network, namely, a fear of the ‘Deep State,’ where powerful unelected actors are perceived to be the
real power brokers calling the shots from behind the scenes and placing limits on personal sov-
ereignty, through the development a new and ever more invasive techniques of ‘control.’ What is it
then about this theme that accounts for its privileged place at the center of our dataset—as a bridge
between the otherwise relatively distinct metanarratives of QAnon and the Great Reset (see Figure
4)? Here it is worth noting what Michel Foucault, in his famous lectures on the birth of neolib-
eralism, called “state phobia” (Foucault, 2008: 187). Afflicting thinkers on the right and the left,
Foucault saw “state phobia” as an “inflationary critical currency” that made a caricature of the
workings of contemporary power, by always imagining its source and terminus in terms of a top-
down “paranoiac and devouring state” (Foucault, 2008: 187–188). Just as there are legitimate
critiques of ‘actual conspiracies,’ there are plenty of principled and coherent anti-statist positions
(see for instance Scott, 1999). Anti-statism becomes conspiratorial when it is inflated to the scale of
the globe and personified by ‘evil’ “surveillance capitalists[…] like Bill Gates” (Mercola and
Cummins, 2021: 26) instead of focusing on the systems of “raw-material-extraction” that forms is
basis of its business model, including that of Instagram itself (Zuboff, 2019: 65, 457). If the term
conspiracy theory typically implies a “political pathology” (Fenster, 2008: 11), then perhaps deep
state phobia is a condition more amenable to remedy—in this last case, through the political
economic critique of surveillance capitalism.

Conclusion and avenues for future research

In this paper, we set out to find empirical evidence for a ‘conspiracy singularity’ that allegedly
formed around the time of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic. Insofar as identifying something as a
conspiracy theory is also to implicitly disqualify it, we should be careful that such claims can be
triangulated from a number of perspectives. To this end, we took a ‘digital hermeneutics’ approach
(Romele et al., 2020) whereby we analyzed a unique archive of Instagram posts.
We hypothesized that (1) over the course of the 2020 outbreak, the pandemic progressively acted as
a catalyst for the coming-together of previously more distinct conspiracy communities and narratives.
And that (2) this coming-together is animated by shared antagonists and protagonists in a broader
drama framed both by concerns around the pandemic as well as by U.S. party politics. In light of these
hypotheses, we found that our dataset contained traces of a large diversity of conspiracist communities
and stories, which made it non-trivial to ascribe any coherence at the level of narratives. Nevertheless,
as introduced in our hashtag analysis, we propose that at least two general narratives could be
identified: QAnon and The Great Reset. While a great deal has been written on the former, the latter
has been less well researched. In the case of QAnon, our findings confirm the return of ‘Pizzagate’ as a
dynamic factor, while at the same time questioning the apparent importance of COVID-19 to the
QAnon narrative. In the case of The Great Reset we observed a clear convergence of smaller narratives
into a conspiracist metanarrative in which Bill Gates figures especially prominently as a kind of
synecdoche for The Great Reset as a mishmash that mixes various old and new critiques of global
governance. At the core of this network are conspiracist readings of existing agendas (“agenda21”) as
opposed to invented ones (“pizzagate”). Yet both cases are connected by a phobia of the Deep State.
While these findings suggest that traces of narrative convergence can indeed be found in our
dataset, some limitations and avenues for future research should be acknowledged here. For one
thing, users of the platform do not have the kind of overview that our methods provide. By the same
token, our methods provide us with limited access to the actual users. While it has been said that
‘echo chambers’ or ‘filter bubbles’ appear to be an artifact of hashtags-based platforms, it does not
Tuters and Willaert 1235

automatically follow that users are trapped inside of these bubbles (Bruns, 2019). It is thus important
to acknowledge that while these methods offer insights into the dynamics of conspiracist narratives,
they are also commentaries on Instagram as a platform, its affordances and its governance in a time
of substantial instability. Notably, twice during our data collection, in August and then again in
October, Instagram’s parent company Facebook, took action to remove large numbers of QAnon-
related accounts from the platform (Frenkel and Kang, 2021: chapter 14). While these actions did
not have a substantial impact on our data collection they do underscore the contingency of the
environment under study as well as the archival status of the dataset. Future work may thus consider
using this dataset to look into Instagram’s moderation policies in times of crisis.
It should likewise be acknowledged that the focus of the present article was predominantly U.S.-
centric. Future research on online conspiracism could therefore benefit from looking beyond the
QAnon conspiracy in order to further diversify the set of loosely connected narratives that we have
here labeled ‘The Great Reset.’ As followed from our hashtag analysis, many of those narratives are
less distinctly right-wing and less clearly American. Furthermore, while our data collection method
was not strictly biased for the U.S., our analysis revealed that the most frequent named entities
(persons and organizations) were mostly related to the context of U.S. politics. Further textual
analysis is required to evaluate how these persons and organizations actually figure in posts from
users outside of the U.S., and how narratives originating in U.S. politics and COVID-19 concerns
might be appropriated to other national contexts.
Finally, within our dataset, we observed the prevalence of hashtag stuffing, which often appeared
as though it was being used primarily as a way of attracting visibility and increasing views by
posting with long lists of keywords, many of which seemed only tangentially related to the post
content (for example, keywords about Bill Gates often initially appeared in posts unrelated to Bill
Gates). An especially interesting path for future work would be to consider to what extent con-
spiratorial convergence may be an artifact of the affordance of hashtag stuffing.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or pub-
lication of this article: This article was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) under grant
agreement AH/V001213/1 and by the European Commission under grant agreement EDMO BELUX INEA/
CEF/ICT/A2020/2394296.

ORCID iD
Marc Tuters  https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1815-9226
Tom Willaert  https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3879-6767

Note
1. Note that in order to improve readability, these data were manually cleaned to highlight antagonism, for
example, removing “trump” and “fox news.”
1236 Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 28(4)

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