Conspiracy theories on Coronavirus vaccines

a discursive approach

Abstract

From the perspective of Discourse Analysis (DA), we propose a study on conspiracy theories about vaccines against the Coronavirus collected from the social network Facebook in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. The main objective is to understand how language works in such object and to establish some of its specificities and regularities. In order to do so, we use the concept of global semantics by Dominique Maingueneau ([1984] 2021). We centered the analyzes on the discursive plan of the themes of four statements, collected in public communities of the platform. This work is based on the hypothesis that the conspiratorial discourse aspires to the same social function as the discourse of the mainstream media, by intending to establish a given understanding of reality. In the analyses, we established three semes claimed by the conspiratorial discursive formation – holism, intentionality and individuality. On the discursive plane of the themes, holism operates at a level of macro integration, establishing direct link between everything and everyone, which results in a fractal structure. Intentionality rejects coincidence as an instance capable of influencing reality – under the constraint of such seme, the conspiratorial discourse establishes causal relationships among a wide range of events. In a theme imposed to the media field – that of the source, individuality coerces the discourse to privilege individual and anonymous sources.