Antisemitic conspiracy fantasy in the age of digital media: Three ‘conspiracy theorists’ and their YouTube audiences

Abstract

Conspiracy fantasy or – to use the more common but less accurately descriptive term – ‘conspiracy theory’ is an enduring genre of discourse historically associated with authoritarian political movements. This article presents a literature review of research on conspiracy fantasy as well as two empirical studies of YouTube videos by three leading conspiracy fantasists. Two of these fantasists have been linked to the far right, while one maintains connections to figures on the far right and the far left. The first study employs content analysis of the 10 most popular videos uploaded by each of the three, and the second employs corpus analysis of keywords in comments posted on all videos uploaded by the three fantasists. Jewish-related entities such as Israel, Zionists and the Rothschild family are found to be among the entities most frequently accused of conspiracy in the videos. Conspiracy accusations against other Western nations (especially the United States and the United Kingdom), as well as their leaders and their media, were also common. Jewish-related lexical items such as ‘Zionist’, ‘Zionists’, ‘Rothschild’ and ‘Jews’ are found to be mentioned with disproportionate frequency in user comments. These findings would appear to reflect the conspiracy fantasy genre’s continuing proximity to its roots in the European antisemitic tradition and add weight to existing findings suggesting that the active YouTube audience responds to latently antisemitic content with more explicitly antisemitic comments.