What Difference Does the Digital Era Make to Authority and Power Structures? A Reply to Beatriz Buarque

Beatriz Buarque (2022) provides a very insightful analysis of how conspiracy theories spread in the digital era. She carries out a thorough analysis of video that was distributed and circulated on social media, issuing the notorious conspiracy theorist David Icke connecting the COVID-19 pandemic to 5G technologies.
There is much to learn from the paper, in terms of theorizing about conspiracy theory and ‘multimodal critical affect-discourse’—the specific methodology used to dissect the video in which Icke spread these ideas about 5G and COVID. We take on this opportunity to build a bridge between the social epistemology of conspiracy theories and social media analysis on the one hand, and philosophy information (PI) on the other hand.