I am leading a series of research investigating the anti-CCP conspiracy circle on YouTube. Considering political conspiracy theories as a combination of factually problematic information and populist morality, we draw on Habermas’s theory of communicative action to analytically distinguish the factual and moral components of conspiracy theories. 

Our first study maps out the mutual endorsement and shared commenter networks of the conspiratorial YouTubers. We also illustrate how such conspiracists weave together factual and moral claims to build convincing narratives. 

Our ongoing research focuses on the audience of conspiracy videos. Anti-CCP conspiracy YouTube is a transnational sphere where mainland Chinese, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau audiences meet and interact with each other. We use an n-gram topic model to understand the topical focuses of each audience segment and take steps to build a supervised machine learning classifier to identify truth and moral rightness claims in the comment section. Our central question is: Given that conspiratorial YouTubers use legitimate moral claims to package their problematic facts, are audiences falling prey to misinformation or seeking moral commiseration?