Communication Strategies Behind the Expressions of Dissent During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Dissent In Context

As the pandemic caused by the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus was reaching its height, the expressions of distrust became a growing concern for those who were trying to provide guidance to citizens and govern through the crisis. Various narratives about the hidden interests, evil intentions, and collusions of elite groups started to spread on the margins of the public sphere—that is, on an unregulated space that is the online media sphere. While some effort has been made to curb their reach, such narratives still continue to exert influence on its highly devoted audience. For the purpose of the current text, the set of claims of such kind will be denominated as “dissenting narratives.” This term is used here since it encompasses the ambiguous field that exists at the intersection of conspiracy theories and daily politics (in particular, that of the populist kind). As it will be seen in the later part of the chapter, the dissensus today is not only communicated with references to secret evil plots, and talking about it exclusively through the lens of conspiracy theory misses some of its other key features. In other words, the dissenting narratives, such as those popularized during the pandemic, rely on a pastiche of messages: including accusations of conspiracies, claims from daily politics, references from popular culture, and so on.

For decades, the claims akin to conspiracy theories were becoming integrated into the culture at large. We can observe this in the transition from previous epochs when conspiracy theory had been the tool of extremist groups at the fringes of society to the contemporary highly mediatized society where conspiratorial thinking becomes more widespread. For instance, the document fabricated in 1903 in Russia with the title Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion was reprinted and distributed to advance anti-Semitic causes and incite violence across the West (Bronner, 2003, p. 1). In that context, the conspiracy theory functioned as an elaborate narrative reliant on printing technology that presented a group (the ethnic or religious Other) as an evil force that, in secret, works to aggravate societal ills. However, with the ascendance of the highly mediatized society of late modernity, the conspiracy theory changed in two key ways. First, it moved from extremist fringes into the mainstream culture; conspiracy became the subject of the entertainment industry, the notable examples being the TV series The X Files (Carter, 1993) and the bestselling novel The Da Vinci Code (Brown, 2003). With that, many started to see a conspiratorial narrative as a useful tool for assigning meaning to complex socio-economic developments through a “cognitive mapping” of a sort (Jameson, 1988). Second, the conspiracy theories now focus largely on internal enemies, instead of primarily depicting the evil Other. This is evident in the popularity of conspiracy theories in the United States that accuse their own government, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), or the “Deep State” of controlling society from the shadows and through undemocratic means (e.g., Horwitz, 2021; Webb, 2014; Williams, 2013). In short, as the narratives that detail a conspiracy became ubiquitous in public life—denoting a rise of the “conspiracy culture”(Knight, 2000)—, their field of action became more dispersed, representing the generalized anxiety over the present and future developments in society, politics, and economy.