Wischerath, D., Piwek, L., Roscoe, J. F., & Davidson, B. I. (2024). Rage against the machine: Exploring violence and emotion in conspiracy narratives on Parler. New Media & Society, 1–23.

Link: https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448241289905

Open access: Yes

Notes: The link between emotions and violence is a complex one—with many shifting contextual factors at interplay. However, one key aspect is key: Emotions play a crucial role in justifying violence. This is one of the insights from the work of Darja Wischerath and colleagues, who set out to explore the relationship between emotions and violence amid conspiracy narratives on Parler—focusing particularly on how violence is legitimized through emotions across multiple conspiracy theories. In short, their results “show the role of anger, contempt, and disgust as sensemaking emotions that open pathways to legitimating and encouraging violence. Specifically, we found that anger and contempt were more frequently expressed in narratives linked to violent events, showing that both situational outrage and a continued devaluation and dehumanization of the outgroup can legitimize and motivate action against the outgroup” (p. 15).

Abstract: The mainstreaming of conspiracy narratives has been associated with a rise in violent offline harms, from harassment, vandalism of communications infrastructure, assault, and in its most extreme form, terrorist attacks. Group-level emotions of anger, contempt, and disgust have been proposed as a pathway to legitimizing violence. Here, we examine expressions of anger, contempt, and disgust as well as violence, threat, hate, planning, grievance, and paranoia within various conspiracy narratives on Parler. We found significant differences between conspiracy narratives for all measures and narratives associated with higher levels of offline violence showing greater levels of expression.