The Proliferation of Alternative Media: How Corona Conspiracy Theories in the Netherlands Fostered New Social Movements

Since the start of the pandemic, many different allegations and suspicions about what was really going on surfaced in the Netherlands. The usual suspects quickly shared their conspiratorial ideas on their own websites and social media platforms, but various new publics were lured by the concerns they put forward and the explanations they offered. The diverse collection of competing explanations about the Corona virus and how we are dealing with the pandemic share many commonalities with conspiracy theories in the rest of Western Europe and the United States. Drawing on the author's ongoing ethnographic research in the Dutch conspiracy world and analysis of the mainstream media discourse on the pandemic, the chapter shows how Corona conspiracy theories fostered the emergence of new social movements. More specifically, it explains how the perceived lack of variation in mainstream media reporting contributed to the emergence and consolidation of alternative conspiracy theory media outlets. These popular initiatives, ranging from personal blogs and podcasts to fully fledged media platforms with increasingly professionalized operations, make use of the open and participatory infrastructure of today's digital information landscape but extend to the offline world as well. This chapter highlights how conspiracy theories are not merely ideas formulated in the abstract but are important drivers of cultural change. The (Dutch) media landscape is profoundly more pluralistic than before, although whether that is a positive development is open to debate.