Transnational conspiracism? Transnationality and national adaptations of far-right conspiracy theories online

Digital platforms and partisan news sites online provide an essential infrastructure for a more transnationally networked far right (Caiani & Kröll 2015) that mobilizes against core democratic values and seeds suspicion and hatred within society. Discussion forums, social media, and other online communication venues afford the construction and maintenance of transnational ideational networks and overarching group identities through shared narratives, visual representations, and shared reference points across borders (Caiani & Parenti 2016; McSwiney et al. 2021; Heft et al. 2022). The possibility of transnational circulation and direct references enabled by digital technology can create and strengthen connections and alliances across borders. The rise of digital platforms and media is also closely linked to an increasing proliferation of conspiracy theories that convey and rearticulate far-right ideologies such as anti-elitism, antisemitism, and xenophobia. Two historically persistent, closely linked conspiracy theories are the narratives of the so-called "New World Order", which supposes secret Jewish-led powers dominating world politics, and the "Great Replacement/White Genocide", which assumes a hidden plan to minimize the White population and Christian culture by, e.g., fostering migration. Terrorist attacks across the world, such as those in Christchurch or Halle, are extreme examples of the threats to which the reception of and belief in such narratives can contribute – and they likewise exemplify the transnationally intertwined diffusion of far-right ideology. Concerning the discourses on and about these two conspiracy theories, our paper, therefore, addresses the question to what extent we find transnational patterns of attention and articulation of these conspiracies. Insights about their shared narrative references, as well as their local variations and adaptations, contribute to a deeper understanding of the far-right’s transnationalization. We conceptualize transnationalization as a) the synchronicity in issue salience across language and country borders across time and b) similarities in the reference points used and referred to in these discourses (Tobler 2010, Eder & Kantner 2000). We expect shared core components of the conspiracy theories to be found transnationally while, at the same time, country- and culture-specific particularities should become clear in specific adaptations. Therefore, in addition to comparing the transnational narrative commonalities of the "Great Replacement" and the "New World Order", we ask how the dynamic between shared and distinct conspiracy discourses develops over time. Our empirical study is based on English-language and German-language posts from Reddit, Tweets from Twitter, and articles from alternative far-right media in the US and Germany in the time frame 2011 - 2021. Raw data have been collected using a comprehensive dictionary in both languages to capture potential conspiracy-related content. After that, we trained and applied a machine learning classifier to distinguish between the conspirational content related to the theories studied. By comparing the intensity of the public visibility of the conspiracy theories over time across country- and language borders, we show how they support the transnationally shared persistence of these antisemitic and xenophobe narrations.