Suspicion and evidence: on the complexities of online truth seeking in times of uncertainty

How do people discern between truth and untruth? What characterizes their engagements with evidence? Some progress in answering these huge questions can be made by exploring them in conditions of radical epistemic uncertainty, such as were the early months of the pandemic, when the virus’s behaviour was largely unknown and the efficacy of interventions unknowable. This article focuses on the workings of suspicion and its relationship with evidence, doing so by analysing conversations collected in a Facebook discussion group devoted to ‘Covid truth’. It argues that suspicion produces its own forms of falsification but has a contentious relationship with positive truth. And by outlining the epistemic labour of self-avowed truth seekers, the article elucidates some of the mechanisms by which Covid conspiracy theories proliferated and explains why its partakers were convinced that they had a critical edge over the rest of us.