Abstract
This paper problematizes the role of YouTube content creators as political brokers. Focusing on conspiracy theories as a genre of political myths, it takes its local context from the Philippines and the Tallano Gold Myth, which aimed to sanitize ousted dictator Ferdinand Marcos’ image for the country’s 2022 presidential elections where his son emerged with an absolute majority win. Investigating discursive power online, the paper orients to the question of how YouTube content creators (re)construct the Philippine sociopolitical context within their videos. Combining Sociocognitive and Social Media Critical Discourse Studies, it explores the potency of conspiratorial narratives popularized by profit-oriented political influencers in creating an environment conducive to illiberal values within fragile democracies. Using narrative, thematic, and qualitative observational analysis, findings suggest that content creators use discursive strategies adopted from mediatized populism, conspiratorial argumentative framing, secrecy as a currency of discursive power, and YouTube-sanctioned deflection of accountability in their content production. Through affordances specific to YouTube being simultaneously a social-networking and income-generating platform, this study argues that content creators perform mythopoetic legitimization as knowledge producers, capitalize on digital context collapse of global and local issues, and carry out populist-style historical distortion to shape a YouTube-enabled discursive practice that enjoins audiences in a problem-oriented recontextualization of sociopolitical issues. The paper tackles discursive power manipulation embedded in digital practices that result in disinformation in the post-truth era. It contributes a severely lacking Philippine perspective in conspiracy theory research that seeks to pinpoint the genre’s entanglements with identity construction, mediatization, and memory politics.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Conspiracy Theory, Historical Distortion, Social Media Critical Discourse Studies
