The "Plandemic" Emojis, Conspiracy Theories and Online Hate Micro-narratives on Twitter

Abstract

Although social science research on COVID-19 is diverse, few studies have focused specifically on emojis. Similarly, research that has paid attention to emojis from a social network analysis perspective is almost non-existent. The study is based on mixed methods and a computational approach. 5,509,549 tweets were collected from the NON-CONSPIRA-HATE Project. A subsample of 221,044 original tweets containing the strings ‘plandemia’ or ‘#plandemia’ was extracted from these. Of these, 46,318 tweets (21%) contained emojis. From here, emojis were analyzed to understand their connection with conspiracy theories and online hate micro-narratives. The analysis of the co-occurrence network of hate emojis and communities within the global network suggests that emojis are crucial for understanding the micro-narratives about the ‘plandemia’. The findings reveal the interconnections between various hate micro-narratives of emojis and conspiracy theories. Several communities of emojis were identified, generating micro-narratives about ‘The circus of the plandemic’, ‘the vaccine as a threat’, the “global anti-plandemic resistance”, and the “global anti-green-pass demonstrations”, all infused with rhetorical and sociolinguistic elements. The continuous use of rhetorical and sociolinguistic resources, such as repeating emojis within the same tweet, serves to convey conspiratorial messages about the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccines (denialist, anti-vaccine, anti-quarantine).