Ctrl+alt+doubt: Decoding the Language of Online Conspiracy Talk

Conspiracy theories are as old as society^--^but never have they spread so fast or so visibly. In an age of social media, moments of crisis and conflict ignite waves of conspiratorial storytelling that reshape how people interpret events, assign blame, and mobilize action.

Ctrl+Alt+Doubt offers a new way to understand why conspiracy theories grow and persist. Rather than treating them as cognitive errors, psychological pathologies, or products of echo chambers, Rao and Greve analyze conspiracy theories as linguistic constructions^--^stories built from recognizable semantic patterns. Using tools from distributional semantics, they map the semantic space of conspiracy talk and show how meanings are assembled, recombined, and diffused online.

Drawing on cases from COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter protests, Rao and Greve show that conspiracy theorizing is a form of bricolage: people tinker with cultural fragments to craft explanations that reduce uncertainty and threat. New conspiracy beliefs are most likely to take hold when they are linguistically close to beliefs people already hold. The book traces how conspiracy theories spread through superspreaders, fear-laden language, bots, and shared hashtags^--^revealing conspiracy theorizing as a form of proto-coordination that generates community, amplifies outrage, and enables collective sensemaking among opponents of social movements.

By foregrounding language and interaction, Ctrl+Alt+Doubt bridges cultural sociology, computational linguistics, and diffusion theory^--^offering a powerful framework for understanding how conspiracy theories spread and how interventions might be designed to blunt their social harm.