Hayagreeva Rao and Henrich R Greve, "Ctrl+Alt+Doubt: Decoding the Language of Online Conspiracy Talk" (Oxford UP, 2026)
About this episode
The episode discusses how conspiracy theories are constructed linguistically and their implications in social contexts.
Ctrl+Alt+Doubt: Decoding the Language of Online Conspiracy Talk (Oxford UP, 2026) offers a new way to understand why conspiracy theories grow and persist. Rather than treating them as cognitive errors, psychological pathologies, or products of echo chambers, Rao and Greve analyze conspiracy theories as linguistic constructions, that is as stories built from recognizable semantic patterns. Drawing on cases from COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter protests, Rao and Greve show that conspiracy theorizing is a form of bricolage. People tinker with cultural fragments to craft explanations that reduce uncertainty and threat. New conspiracy beliefs are most likely to take hold when they are linguistically close to beliefs people already hold. The book traces how conspiracy theories spread through superspreaders, fear-laden language, bots, and shared hashtags, revealing conspiracy theorizing as a form of proto-coordination that generates community, amplifies outrage, and enables collective sensemaking among opponents of social movements.
People in this episode
Guests: Hayagreeva Rao, Henrich R Greve
Topics covered
- conspiracy theories
- linguistic analysis
- social movements
- COVID-19
- Black Lives Matter
- community building
Keywords
- conspiracy theories
- linguistic constructions
- semantic patterns
- social movements
- community
- collective sensemaking
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Oxford UP
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