Online Conspiracy Theorizing as Conversational Coordination

Recent years have seen a joint increase in political polarization and social media use, leading to conflicting interpretations and reactions to social events. Scholars have shown that moral outrage is a catalyst for mobilization and protest participation. However, extant research neglects how online moral outrage about events fuels conspiracy theories as explanations, and how conspiracy theory explanations of events generate moral outrage in individuals. We address this gap by using the Black Lives Matter (BLM) social movement protests as a common exogenous shock. While BLM protests were triggered by moral outrage against police brutality, opponents interpreted them as threats to law and order. We show that violent BLM protests significantly increased moral outrage and conspiracy theory endorsements. We also observe a bidirectional, cyclical effect between moral outrage and conspiracy endorsements over time. These dynamics unfolded in an identity field where people branded BLM protestors as terrorists using hashtags and self-identified with the same hashtags.