Rumor has it. The COVID-19 Infodemic as the Repository of Conspiracy

Access to the right information, at the right time and through trustworthy sources, is not only critical but necessary, especially during health-related emergencies such as the current COVID-19 pandemic which has forced billions of people into isolation. During this worldwide phenomenon, digital access to information has been at its highest, but it has also posed new challenges such as the surge of an infodemic (Zarocostas 2020) or an overabundance of information generated by the practices of eliciting and disseminating half-truths and conspiracy theories especially via independent or alternative media outlets (Del Vicario et al. 2019). By focusing on the US media landscape, this study intends to explore the critical workings of such platforms, and provide evidence of how they support and intensify the infodemic phenomenon by acting as seed sources or primary online providers of (mis)information with direct access to secondary sources such as social media accounts and other knowledge-sharing platforms. In particular, the study argues that these seed sources appeal to the constitutional principle of freedom of expression to justify a conspiratorial representation of COVID-19 disseminated in its many variants, namely fake news, rumors, scams, stigma, magical cures, and alarming conspiracy claims. By drawing from critical discourse studies, and social semiotics theory (van Leeuwen 2005), and by adopting a multimodal discourse analysis approach (Kress, van Leeuwen 2020; Machin, Mayr 2012; Ledin, Machin 2018), the study investigates a corpus of linguistic and other semiotic resources collected from the London Real and its affiliated Digital Freedom Platform, both held responsible for the dissemination of the highly contested Plandemic video series containing conspiratorial content accused of influencing public opinion (Del Vicario et al. 2016; Kulshrestha et al. 2017).