{"title":"Conspiracy theories as engines of connection for enriched public debates on emerging technologies.","authors":"Gabriel Dorthe","doi":"10.1038/s43247-025-02581-x","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Conspiracy theories on COVID-19 mRNA vaccines and solar geoengineering (chemtrails) tend to reinforce one another, thereby posing significant challenges to public policy and scientific norms and generating confusion by conflating disparate issues. This paper is based on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the United States, Germany, Switzerland, and France since 2015 in these two areas of active conspiracy attention, involving observation of social media pages and blogs, active participation in gatherings, and semi-structured interviews. Here, I adopt a diplomatic perspective, highlighting the reciprocal suspicion between science policy and conspiratorial thinking in a competition between two sets of connections of scientific facts, values, politics, fears, and hopes. The present study suggests that the contamination of the scientific discourse by seemingly unrelated claims in conspiracy theories offers fruitful insights to science communication into how publics make sense of science and technology in the fierce debates surrounding immunization and climate policy.</p>","PeriodicalId":10530,"journal":{"name":"Communications Earth & Environment","volume":"6 1","pages":"655"},"PeriodicalIF":8.9000,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12350156/pdf/","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Communications Earth & Environment","FirstCategoryId":"93","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-025-02581-x","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"地球科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"2025/8/13 0:00:00","PubModel":"Epub","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Conspiracy theories on COVID-19 mRNA vaccines and solar geoengineering (chemtrails) tend to reinforce one another, thereby posing significant challenges to public policy and scientific norms and generating confusion by conflating disparate issues. This paper is based on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the United States, Germany, Switzerland, and France since 2015 in these two areas of active conspiracy attention, involving observation of social media pages and blogs, active participation in gatherings, and semi-structured interviews. Here, I adopt a diplomatic perspective, highlighting the reciprocal suspicion between science policy and conspiratorial thinking in a competition between two sets of connections of scientific facts, values, politics, fears, and hopes. The present study suggests that the contamination of the scientific discourse by seemingly unrelated claims in conspiracy theories offers fruitful insights to science communication into how publics make sense of science and technology in the fierce debates surrounding immunization and climate policy.
期刊介绍:
Communications Earth & Environment is an open access journal from Nature Portfolio publishing high-quality research, reviews and commentary in all areas of the Earth, environmental and planetary sciences. Research papers published by the journal represent significant advances that bring new insight to a specialized area in Earth science, planetary science or environmental science.
Communications Earth & Environment has a 2-year impact factor of 7.9 (2022 Journal Citation Reports®). Articles published in the journal in 2022 were downloaded 1,412,858 times. Median time from submission to the first editorial decision is 8 days.