When Issues Stop Being Issues: Narrative Capture in Policy Debates

This talk examines conspiracization as a process through which public policy issues become absorbed into recurring conspiracy narratives over time. Rather than treating conspiracy as a belief system, misinformation, or coordinated manipulation, it focuses on how relatively stable narrative templates—such as population control, hidden governance, and civilizational threat—reappear across different issue domains. Drawing on historical conspiracy texts alongside empirical material from social media data, cultural artifacts, and book-based sources from the COVID-19 period, the talk traces how issues such as Agenda 2030 and Digital ID are progressively framed through older narrative structures that long predate these policies. As these narratives migrate, they begin to displace issue-specific debate, to the point where public issues cease to function as issues in their own right, redirecting attention away from concrete policy questions toward generalized suspicion. I argue that this form of narrative capture poses a challenge for issue-centric approaches to online political communication, as well as for content moderation and risk assessment frameworks that focus on discrete claims or identifiable misinformation. Because conspiracization operates upstream of false claims, persuasion, or coordinated campaigns, it highlights a mode of democratic risk that is difficult to detect through content-based or belief-oriented frameworks alone.