Accessing to a “Truer Truth”: Conspiracy and Figurative Reasoning From Covid-19 to the Russia–Ukraine War

Abstract

This research hypothesizes that all conspiracy theories have dominating isotopies and images-symbols regardless of ideology or context. As a result, I hypothesized that the common denominator might be discovered in figurative reasoning, which means using the same representations to explain current events, in order to detect an ideal center of the semantic universe of conspiracy where the diverse conspiracist fringes converge. Social media invariant topicalizations of the Covid-19 epidemic and the Russia–Ukraine war are the ideal field to validate this hypothesis. The corpus on which the study was conducted consists of thousands of online items published between February 15, 2020, and October 15, 2022. Within the corpus were chosen posts by QAnon supporters designated as disinformation “superspreaders.”