Making sense of a pandemic: reasoning about COVID-19 in the intellectual dark web.

In this study, I examine how users of an online Reddit community, r/IntellectualDarkWeb, forged an anti-establishment collective identity through practices of "heterodox scientific" reasoning. I do so through a discursive analysis of comments and posts made to r/IntellectualDarkWeb during the COVID-19 pandemic. First, I deploy the BERTopic algorithm to cluster my corpus and surface topics pertaining to COVID-19. Second, I engage in a qualitative content analysis of the relevant clusters to understand how discourses about COVID-19 were mobilized by subreddit users. I show that discussions about COVID-19 were polarized along "contrarian" and "anti-contrarian" lines, with significant implications for the subreddit's process of collective identity. Overwhelmingly, contrarian content that expressed skepticism towards vaccines, mistrust towards experts, and cynicism about the medical establishment was affirmed by r/IntellectualDarkWeb users. By contrast, anti-contrarian content that sought to counter anti-vaccine rhetoric, defend expertise, or criticize subreddit users for their contrarianism was penalized. A key factor in this dynamic was Reddit's scoring mechanism, which empowered users to publicly upvote contrarian affirming content while simultaneously downvoting anti-contrarian content. As users participated in sense making about COVID-19, they deployed Reddit's scoring mechanism to reinforce a contrarian collective identity oriented around a practice of heterodox science. My research shows the continued relevance of the concept of collective identity in the digital age and its utility for understanding contemporary reactionary social movements.
Competing Interests: The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
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