The ascent of memetic movements : Social media, Levinasian ethics and the global spread of Q-anon conspiracy theories

The ascent of social media continues to have profound and far-reaching impacts on societies and institutions, by way of becoming increasingly intertwined with social movements across the world. Moreover, there is an increasing awareness of how people are being lured into consuming certain information through meme-like virality, or gamelike characteristics, paralleling an unprecedented contagion of conspiracy theories. Nevertheless, strikingly few studies explicitly connect the dots on how our current post-pandemic onslaught of online conspiracist fervour may have more to do with the medium than with the actual content that comes through. This in spite of the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol, that in large part was enmeshed in this elaborate misinformation complex called Q-anon, wherein a bizarre assemblage of disinformation loosely anchored in an underlying white supremacist logic, could consolidate a global and cross-cultural movement through the power of the meme. In this chapter, we explore how this Q-anon movement that played a significant role in the attack of January 6th did not just pull off this one extraordinary assault on US democracy and fall apart in the flurry of counter-conspiratorial evidence revealed in its wake. More worryingly, it has proved resilient enough to spread globally and across cultural boundaries to countries as diverse as Sweden and Japan. Exploring this phenomenon, we will be web-scraping relevant social media in Japan and Sweden. Finally, by employing a Levinasian perspective on ethics, we consider the appropriate lessons of what in this view may be seen as a reification of otherness to accentuate sameness, as opposed to appreciating alterity as constitutive of subjectification and the ethics associated therewith.
JSPS/STINT Bilateral Joint Research Project “Information and Communication Technology for Sustainability and Ethics: Cross-national Studies between Japan and Sweden” (JPJSBP120185411)