BACKGROUND: Surveys have found concerningly high levels of agreement that the United States will experience civil war soon. This study assesses variation in expectation of and perceived need for civil war with respondent sociopolitical characteristics, beliefs, firearm ownership, and willingness to engage in political violence. METHODS: Findings ar...
BACKGROUND: A 2022 survey in the USA found concerningly high prevalences of support for and personal willingness to engage in political violence, of beliefs associated with such violence, and of belief that civil war was likely in the near future. It is important to determine the durability of those findings. METHODS: Wave 2 of a nationally represe...
status: published
Published in Frontiers in Communication
Rather than seeking to recuperate the ideal of a digital public sphere or lament its demise with the rise of social media platforms, in this paper I seek to identify the dangers of precisely this insistence to imagine the Internet as a public sphere. It is this curious insistence and persistence that, I claim, may feed into precisely those post-tru...
Published in Frontiers in Communication
Introduction This article explores two QAnon subgroups that were not active during the initial phase of the movement but now epitomize how QAnon has capitalized on social media to reach more people. We examine these smaller communities through the lens of information literacy and other literacies to identify opportunities for librarians and educato...
BACKGROUND: Current conditions in the USA suggest an increasing risk for political violence. Little is known about the prevalence of beliefs that might lead to political violence, about support for and personal willingness to engage in political violence, and about how those measures vary with individual characteristics, lethality of violence, poli...
Published in Frontiers in Sociology
Introduction QAnon, in the United States, has become something of household name due to its role in the January 6th insurrection, and because of the relatively high degree of media attention it has received. While such coverage has been useful in understanding this conspiracy movement, it has also painted a picture of QAnon that is incomplete. Meth...
Published in Frontiers in Sociology
Introduction Digital ethnography is a relatively new practice with unclear standards and guidelines. As a result, the ethics of the practice remain unclear. Scholarly debates have emerged surrounding the decision of many researchers and institutional review boards to treat social media data as public. Concerns have also been raised about how inform...
Il n’existe pas d’un côté des « farfelus » qui voient des complots partout et de l’autre, des scientifiques rationnels qui considèrent que les complots sont des divagations. L’adhésion aux théories du complot n’est pas un simple oui ou non. C’est un curseur qui indique que chacun se pose des questions. Les théories du complot nous invitent à ne pas...
Il n’existe pas d’un côté des « farfelus » qui voient des complots partout et de l’autre, des scientifiques rationnels qui considèrent que les complots sont des divagations. L’adhésion aux théories du complot n’est pas un simple oui ou non. C’est un curseur qui indique que chacun se pose des questions. Les théories du complot nous invitent à ne pas...
