From Scientific to Syncretic Patchwork Storytelling: The Discursive Ecosystem of Italian Stop 5G Refused Knowledge Communities

Abstract

This chapter addresses the discursive practices, media-related and not, adopted by the Italian Stop 5G RKC to produce, stabilise and transform its shared (refused) knowledge. Adopting an ecological approach, this inquiry has its main focus on the digital sphere as a transmedia circulation environment in which a range of discourses and narratives can coexist and interact in multiple ways, sometimes colliding and competing, sometimes adapting to each other, sometimes merging in new ways. In particular, it shows how, during the pandemic crisis, the Stop 5G RKC transformed its discursive practices (and, consequently, its shared knowledge) from a ‘scientific patchwork’ storytelling approach—based on a rigid definition of borders and selection of scientific sources—to a ‘syncretic patchwork’ storytelling approach—based on combining diverse and sometimes conflicting discursive sources (e.g. scientific knowledge, folklore, new age spirituality and conspiracy theories). This perspective allows to highlight the close relationship between the RKCs’ discursive practices, their forms of organisation and the shared (refused) knowledge they produce and reproduce.

5.1 Introduction

The relationship between RKCs as social worlds (Clarke & Star 2007; see also Chap. 2 by Federico Neresini) and the knowledge they profess must be conceived as inherently co-constitutive. On one hand, sharing knowledge refused by the scientific community constitutes RKCs’ ‘principal affiliative mechanism’, ‘both making and marking [their] boundaries’ (Clarke & Star, 2007, p. 115). It is sharing a common system of beliefs which prompts individuals to join these groups, keeps RKCs together and potentially accords members specific expertise-based status. On the other hand, this knowledge is not unchanging and pre-existing members’ participation, but both pre-condition and outcome of their participation itself: it is continuously produced and reproduced by RKCs themselves through ongoing discoursivisation practices performed in a range of ‘situations’ across a plurality of sites (Clarke, 2005). This is the case, for example, of live meetings or social media debates to which members contribute with new information or by contesting certain assumptions in favour of others. It is also the case of the production of articles, books, videos and other cultural artefacts in which RKCs’ shared knowledge achieves a higher level of systematisation, becoming, however temporarily, more stable.

It is precisely to account for this co-constitutive relationship that the social worlds framework (SWF) moves beyond ‘concepts of discourse analysis stemming from European phenomenology and critical theory’ (Clarke & Star, 2007, p. 116) to address the discursive production situation (Strübing, 2019) where the social world and its discourses are simultaneously shaped. To this end, it adopts an ecological approach that conceives of the situatedness of social discourse production in an relational way, that is, as a form of interaction between a plurality of social actors and nonhuman actants (such as social platforms’ algorithms, for example) participating to the same social world, and to the wider arena revolving around the same ‘matter of concern’ (Latour, 2004). Notably,

All the elements empirically found in the situation of interest […] are understood as co-constitutive—they help to make each other up and together constitute the situation as a whole [:] things have meaning only in relation to the situations in which they are found or occur. (Clarke, 2019, p. 15)

In what follows, I will adopt this perspective to address the discursive knowledge-production situations enacted by the Italian Stop 5G RKC throughout its history. This case study is, in fact, especially revealing regarding the ‘situatedness and contingency, history and fluidity, and commitment and change’ (Clarke & Star, 2007, p. 113) of the co-constitutive relationship between RKCs and their shared knowledge. In particular, I will focus on the strategies adopted by the Stop 5G RKC to mark the boundaries of its discursive practices  in order to stabilise its shared knowledge, and the radical changes that took place in these practices during the COVID-19 pandemic. I will describe this turn—which is currently risking breaking this RKC up—in terms of a shift from a ‘scientific’ to a ‘syncretic’ patchwork storytelling approach, the former based on selecting sources regarded as scientific, the latter combining diverse and sometimes conflicting discursive sources, such as scientific knowledge, folklore, new age spirituality and conspiracy theories.

It is, however, impossible to address this turn without paying systematic attention to the role played by media—and social media in particular—in the concrete discursive knowledge production situation analysed here. As we will see, a significant part of RKC discursive practices are media-related (Couldry, 2004, 2012) and became exclusively so during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. Before we proceed further then, we need to adapt a methodological framework from media studies to support the ecological approach advocated by the SWF when dealing with media-related practices.

5.2 A Media Ecosystem Approach to RKC Discursive Shared Belief Production

Over the last two decades, an ecological methodological sensibility has emerged in various subfields of research within media studies (such as journalism studies, media archaeology and media storytelling studies), prompting scholars to move beyond approaches centred on a single medium and an overly rigid compartmentalisation of their research interests into user-, content- and technology-related issues (Anderson, 2016; Fuller, 2005; Pescatore, 2018; Taffel, 2019; Zuckerman, 2021). However differently—and sometimes inconsistently—understood by the various authors, the concepts of (media/news/narrative) ecology and (media/news/narrative) ecosystems have been leveraged to acknowledge that media phenomena can only be tackled in a relational way, as an interplay of heterogeneous and mutually constitutive entities (Tosoni & Tarantino, 2013): symbolic and material, human and nonhuman, pragmatic and structural, and social, economic and technological.

This rhizomatic approach to media ecology, which should not be confused with the environmental media ecology tradition stemming from the work of Marshal McLuhan and Neil Postman (Anderson, 2016), developed independently of the SWF. Nonetheless, a number of shared theoretical inspirations—especially the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (2004, or. ed. 1980) and actor–network theory—mean that rhizomatic media ecology and SWF converge on some key methodological points. Sy Taffel (2019), in particular, has underlined the centrality of Deleuzian concepts of rhizome, describing the non-linearity of interrelationships between heterogeneous elements, and assemblage as:

A way of describing the process by which collective entities of humans, nonhuman biological organisms and nonliving actors (such as technologies) are composed. … Thinking in terms of assemblages means going beyond isolated objects-in-themselves, instead studying the configurative relationships between entities. … Things do not exist alone, or as connected individuals, but as entangled, intra-active assemblages. (p. 36)

For the purposes of this chapter, one of the most inspiring applications of this rhizomatic ecological approach regards narrative ecosystems. Addressing the specificities of recent media products, Guglielmo Pescatore (2018) has described the way that the new forms of storytelling adopted by these are not only transmedia but also made up of modular elements that cannot be regarded as ‘text-objects since their only narrative coherence constraints are local’¹ and ‘cannot be attributed to the strong intentionality of a subject governing the whole system’ but are rather designed around an initial ‘core set’ of ‘locations, characters, users and the properties deriving from them’ (p. 28). This core set constitutes the common ground for the interaction of a plurality of human and nonhuman actors and actants (i.e. authors, audiences, platforms and media formats) that translate it into a plurality of narrative orientations in reciprocal synergy or competition. It is thus not possible to make sense of these products by means of content or narrative analysis alone. What is required is a focus on the dynamic structuring of the environment promoting the interaction between actors and actants from which they stem. One of the most fascinating examples discussed by Pescatore (2018) are two experiments in swarming storytelling by Kai Pata (2011) in which users equipped with computers, cameras and smartphones were asked to produce bits of a story consisting of a picture and some comments. These collective endeavours, in which all participants acted as producers and audiences, generated hypertextual forms of storytelling characterised by the absence of a central text or ‘grand master’:

There are several access points to different stories. Users enter from the point that defines their perspective. Perspectives are individual, but different shared perspectives create niches, clusters of narratives and plots that generate greater engagement and are more commented upon, shared and fed by other writing processes. The system is polycentric, inhabited by narratives and [clusters] of stories ‘scattered’ across the ecosystem. (Bisoni et al., 2013, p. 20)

Clare Birchall and Peter Knight (2023) described the structure of the conspiracy theories that took shape and circulated on the Internet, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic and including those encapsulating refused knowledge about 5G, exactly in this way. This structure is described as a galaxy of modular bits of storytelling and pieces of knowledge lacking a grand master and accessible from several entry points—in which users were invited to ‘do [their] own research’ and ‘fill in the dots’ generating clusters of narratives of various degrees of persistence and intensity. This galaxy began to engage the Italian Stop 5G RKC and its arena during the COVID-19 pandemic. As Birchall and Knight (2023) underlined, ‘ecology provides a potentially productive way of thinking about the complex interaction between the content, the users, the technological infrastructure and the social dynamics of the different digital platforms’ (p. 53). From this perspective, the digital sphere can be seen as a vast interconnected discursive ecosystem (IDE), an environment in which different discourses and narratives can coexist and interact in multiple ways in their transmedia circulation, sometimes colliding and competing, sometimes adapting to each other and sometimes reassembling into new and broader ones.

Yet, the authors warn that the ecological metaphor ‘is not free of its own unspoken assumptions’ (p. 53). Within the current rhizomatic strand of research in media studies in particular, the metaphor tends to drive scholars to overlook the concrete discursive production situations generating temporary, however stabilised, assemblages, in favour of a broad overview of the functioning of the ecosystem as a whole. In journalism studies, for example, Chris Anderson (2016) observes that these studies often take

‘a big data’ approach to analysing a large corpus of digital material. Fewer of them study journalistic diffusion in a more granular way, and almost none of these studies draw upon ethnographic or other forms of qualitative research in order to look at how these rhizomatic processes play out on the ground. (p. 420)

By contrast, the SWF always examines the system from one or more situated perspectives, focusing on ‘the situation of production [as well as on] how discourses are produced, by whom, with what resources, and under what conditions’ (Clarke 2005: 155), on the ‘[negotiations of] discourses in social relationships/interaction’, and on the ‘[production of] identities and subjectivities through discourse’ (Clarke, 2005, p. 155). We will therefore address the discursive knowledge production practices of the Stop 5G social world within the digital sphere as an interconnected discursive ecosystem ethnographically, with an analytical focus on the situatedness of their enactment.

5.3 Contesting 5G Deployment: From Scientific to Syncretic Patchwork Storytelling

As we have seen, in an ecological perspective, the structuring of RKCs’ social worlds and of their wider arena, their forms of discursive production, their media-related practices and, ultimately, their shared beliefs are tightly intertwined: this means that transformation of one of these elements implies transformation in all the others too. From this perspective four phases in the Italian Stop 5G RKC can be distinguished:

• a public appeal phase (2017–2018, predating our empirical investigation) whose centre-stage players were groups of scientists contesting the official view of the effects of electromagnetic fields;

• an activist phase (2018–2020, that we observed ethnographically) in which a growing number of laypeople organised in local groups entered the social world and arena, publicly contesting the official view;

• an intermediate phase at the beginning of the pandemic crisis (February–April 2020) in which the RKC’s discursive practices began displaying significant transformation processes in an attempt to make sense of the virus;

• a subsequent pandemic crisis phase (until the end of 2020, when our systematic observation ended), in which a large part of the RKC took a populist (or even conspiratorial) turn.

As we saw above, this can also be read as a movement from a ‘scientific’ to a ‘syncretic’ patchwork storytelling approach in the RKC’s knowledge production practices. I will now move onto reconstructing the main stages in this turn by means of the tenets of the (media) ecological approach outlined above.

5.3.1 RKC as a Network of Independent Scientists: the Adoption of a Scientific Patchwork Storytelling Strategy (2017–2018)

In the first phase of challenge to 5G rollout, the Stop 5G RKC was largely made up of international ‘independent’ researcher groups (as the RKC defines scientists not funded by the industry) pursuing a strategy already used to challenge 3G and 4G technologies (Soneryd, 2007). On the basis of a growing number of articles published in peer-reviewed journals, they resorted to public appeals published in scientific journals and on the web to raise awareness in the institutions and public opinion on the non-thermal effects of non-ionising electromagnetic radiation. These effects were (and are) dismissed as scientifically unfounded by organisations such as the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection (ICNIRP), an NGO tasked with defining safety guidelines for exposure to electromagnetic fields and recognised by the World Health Organisation. These guidelines–which consider the thermal effects alone–have been accepted by the EU and the US and set the limit at 61 V/m (Italy applies a more restrictive limit of 6 V/m).

In 2015, for example, several ‘scientists engaged in the study of the biological and health effects of non-ionising electromagnetic fields’ published an international appeal related to technologies preceding 5G. This urged ‘the United Nations (UN) and all member states in the world to encourage the World Health Organization (WHO) to exert strong leadership in fostering the development of more protective electromagnetic fields (EMF) guidelines’² than those put forward by the ICNIRP, which was accused of ignoring all scientific literature on ‘long-term exposure and low-intensity effects’. Two years later, in September 2017, Professors Rainer Nyberg and Lennart Hardell quoted this appeal in their The 5G Appeal,³ asking the EU to apply ‘a moratorium on the roll-out of 5G’. The appeal argued that the existence of low-intensity, long-term non-thermal effects had been proven by a vast amount of scientific literature, and predicted that these effects would be even more severe with 5G. Moreover, it explicitly accused the ICNIRP of a conflict of interest in its refusal to consider this body of knowledge, quoting an article written by Lennart Hardell (2017) himself, which called the ICNIRP an ‘industry loyal NGO’ in support of this. The appeal received two replies in that same year (Hardell & Nyberg, 2020) from the European Directorate-General of Health and Food Safety and from the European Commission which dismissed the low-intensity non-thermal effect hypothesis and rejected the conflict of interest allegations.⁴

That same year a number of Italian health- and science-related associations adopted this appeal strategy to put pressure on national and local government. This was especially the case of ISDE (International Society of Doctors for Environment) Italia which invoked the precautionary principle to demand a moratorium on 5G experimentation and an international appeal from ISDE International followed in 2018.

For their scientific claims, these and other appeals relied on literature reviews and meta-analyses produced by independent researchers throughout the history of the challenge to mobile communication infrastructure deployment. A case in point is the BioInitiative report (BIR),⁵ published online for the first time in 2007, reissued in extended form in 2013 and updated several times since then. This vast literature review constitutes one of the main references used by the RKC and its appeals. The report has been strongly criticised by several independent and governmental research groups for a plurality of reasons, however, ranging from poor selection criteria concerning the studies included in the review to conclusions that are only partially grounded in the review itself. On the occasion of the publication of the 2013 edition, for example, a critical assessment by Science-Based Medicine, an online editorial project on scientific controversies owned and operated by the New England Skeptical Society (an independent, non-profit organisation) reported several scientific flaws in the report and considered it an evident case of confirmation bias, or ‘cherry-picking’:

The authors of the BIR commit exactly this error with EMF bioeffects studies, by speculating at length about possible implications of studies reporting effects of EMF while saying little about studies that failed to find effects. Rather than taking a ‘weight-of-evidence approach’ to put all the studies together in a coherent picture, most authors simply listed numbers of studies reporting effects (of whatever nature at whatever exposure level) in comparison with those that found none. (Foster & Trottier, 2013)

This discursive strategy—that I define ‘scientific patchwork storytelling’—consists of the RKC assembling its shared knowledge by collecting disparate ‘scientific’ sources all in support of the existence of non-thermal effects, where ‘scientific’ is understood as ‘published in peer-reviewed journals’, regardless of their reputation within the scientific community or of the reception of the individual articles in the existing literature. Moreover, these sources—dealing with different electromagnetic wave frequencies and reporting various types of biological effects—are neither assembled into a coherent picture nor consider studies reporting conflicting results, even solely for the purposes of deconstructing them.

In this strategy, conflicting studies are dealt with asymmetrically; to make sense of them, the RKC moves onto different epistemic ground and mobilises a narrative centred on the conflicts of interest of adversarial scientists and groups of experts. In particular, the newest studies are dismissed as uproar deliberately produced through industry-funded research to generate a state of uncertainty that fosters the survival of the status quo—and facilitates the deployment of the new 5G infrastructure. Historicisation is a key discursive strategy here: rather than engaging in deconstructing and criticising opposing studies, the RKC deploys historical comparison to make sense of the present situation. The slow recognition of tobacco’s carcinogenicity, in particular, is used as a probatory example of industries’ ability to deliberately manufacture scientific uncertainty (Bero, 2005; Brandt, 2012) and considered proof of the plausibility of an alleged ongoing disinformation campaign within the scientific community.

The adoption of this discursive strategy by the RKC must be viewed in the light of its objectives in the broader 5G deployment arena: these groups of scientists aim to draw institutional and public attention to what is regarded as a deliberately ignored body of scientific evidence. Yet scientific patchwork storytelling, together with its complementary delegitimising narrative, played a pivotal role in shaping RKC knowledge in the subsequent phase as well, when activists entered the scene and engaged in 5G opposition at the local and municipal levels.

5.3.2 The Activist Phase: Guarding the Borders of Scientific Patchwork Storytelling (2018–2020)

In September 2018 Arthur Firstenberg launched the international Stop 5G on Earth and in Space appeal,⁶ to the ‘UN, WHO, EU, Council of Europe and governments of all nations’ and signed by a number of ‘scientists, doctors, environmental organizations and citizens’. The appeal adopted the strategy employed by the RKC in its previous phase, with the issue of the deployment of the new communicative infrastructure being strictly framed as a health and environmental problem, and the appeal backed by a body of peer-reviewed articles proving the existence of non-thermal EMF effects. It accused public and private institutions of conflicts of interest in refusing to take these into account in policymaking. This time, however, the appeal did not come from groups of independent scientists but from civil society: Firstenberg is an American activist affected by electromagnetic hypersensitivity, a condition triggered by EMF that is not recognised by WHO. This new central importance of the activist scene added extra complexity to the RKC’s social world and marked a new phase in the opposition to 5G deployment.

An activist scene began to take shape in Italy this same year, when the 5G issue gained public visibility and was covered by legacy media, a process fostered by a plurality of events. The first of these was a sustained effort to promote public awareness by national associations and groups, such as Alleanza Italiana Stop 5G (AIS5G),⁷ an ‘informal committee and a non-partisan network … standing up for the … precautionary principle’ founded in 2018. This same year, to reach a wider audience than its blog and Facebook page followers, the committee launched a crowdfunding campaign and bought a national newspaper page in Il Fatto Quotidiano and some advertising space on the leftist radio station Radio Popolare. It also launched an awareness-raising campaign in various cities involved in 5G experimentation which relied on mobile billboards mounted on trucks, a communication strategy also used by no-vax groups and Pro Vita associations. The committee’s main promotor and spokesperson was (and still is) journalist Maurizio Martucci (see Chap. 4 by Paolo Bory), ‘author of many investigative and crime books on soccer [who was now working] on health and environment, rare conditions and alternative medicine’,⁸ and had just published a self-defence manual for electrosensitive people (Martucci, 2018), and later, in 2020 published #Stop5G (Martucci, 2020), a bitterly critical investigative book on 5G to which we will return. Those named by the committee’s blog as affiliated and/or cooperating with the network were ISDE Italia, Associazione Nazionale Piccoli Comuni di Italia (Italian Association of Mayors of Small Towns), several influencers who have, elsewhere, been defined as ‘catalysts of scientific dissent’⁹ (Bory et al., 2023) and Bologna’s Istituto Ramazzini, a non-profit social cooperative operating in the field of independent research on cancer and medical science popularisation.

This institute was also at the heart of a second key event. Until 2018, the knowledge assembled by the RKC through scientific patchwork storytelling lacked a significant piece in its claims to public credibility. Although it included epidemiological and in vitro experimental evidence, and hypotheses on the biological plausibility of EMF effects, it lacked in vivo studies on a significant number of animals. This gap was filled by the findings of two studies published by independent researchers: one from the American National Toxicology Program (National Toxicology Program, 2018) and one from Istituto Ramazzini (Falcioni et al., 2018). Both reported the insurgence of specific kinds of cancers in mice and rats exposed to (non-5G) electromagnetic fields. Although part of the scientific community cast doubt on the soundness of these studies and the significance of their results (including ICNIRP¹⁰), this research gained attention from legacy media, including national public and private TV channels. A case in point is the journalistic TV programme Report, screened on national public channel RAI3, which broadcast an alarming episode¹¹ on the possible effects of 5G. Links to the episode were published on the AIS5G blog and Facebook page and in other RKC ecosystem ‘owned spaces’¹² (Penttinen & Ciuchita, 2022), becoming a reference point for many groups of activists who contributed to disseminating it.

Finally, from 2018 onwards, the attention of legacy media and the RKC was also captured by a series of public statements from European Union bodies such as the Scientific Committee on Health, Environmental and Emerging Risks (SCHEER) which included 5G its list of 14 ‘emerging issues to bring to the attention of the Commission service’ because ‘the lack of clear evidence to inform the development of exposure guidelines to 5G technology [left] open the possibility of unintended biological consequences’ (SCHEER, 2018, p. 14)¹³; the document ‘5G Deployment: State of Play in Europe, USA and Asia’ (2019) commissioned by the European Parliament Committee on Industry, Research, and Energy stating that ‘significant concern [was] emerging over the possible impact on health and safety arising from potentially much higher exposure to radiofrequency electromagnetic radiation arising from 5G’; and the 2021 report Health Impact of 5G,¹⁴ commissioned to Dr Belpoggi by the European Parliament’s Panel for the Future of Science and Technology (STOA), that raised several concerns. These were supplemented by several court rulings reported with considerable emphasis by the local and national press which recognised some types of tumours occurring in cases of heavy work-related use of mobile phones as occupational accidents. Notably, in the first of these (2012), the Corte di Cassazione of Brescia was called upon to decide upon litigation between a manager and INAIL (the Italian occupational health institute). The court dealt with the contradictory scientific literature presented and decided to accord greater credit to studies produced by ‘independent researchers’, officially validating the delegitimising narrative that complemented the Stop 5G scientific patchwork storytelling strategy.¹⁵

The momentum of this rise in the visibility of the potential 5G risks led to the creation of two Italian groups on Facebook by the end of 2018, both of which adopted the title of Firstenberg’s appeal: Stop 5G Italia and Stop Sperimentazione 5G. The two groups soon amassed over 10,000 members each. Other groups followed, on both Facebook and WhatsApp, (e.g. No Elettrosmog) sometimes translocally addressing different categories of people (such as the Facebook group Mamme Stop 5G, for mothers). Concomitantly, a vast constellation of small local groups appeared in all the main Italian cities, all using the Stop 5G label. Most of these groups adopted a similar media territory¹⁶ for their activist practices centred around a Facebook group (e.g. Stop 5G Milano) for communication among members and sympathisers and a more restricted interactional space on WhatsApp for discussions and coordination between activists. These local groups organised their activities autonomously but were loosely and informally coordinated in national online groups, where they could also get in contact with national associations.

Local activist groups, national associations and committees adopted a twofold, synergic strategy. On one hand they engaged in awareness-raising campaigns consisting mostly of public conferences, leafleting, demonstrations and Facebook activities. In 2019 dozens of public conferences were held all over Italy organised not only by national associations and committees but also by local groups with the participation of one or more members of national associations and at which institutional representatives were frequently invited to participate as speakers or attendees. These events were launched and advertised on the RKC’s online owned spaces and reposted in its spaces of resonance. They were also often documented (sometimes via live streaming) to produce excerpts later published and circulated on the Internet.

On the other hand, while pursuing their strategy of appeals at the national and European levels, national associations and groups backed up local groups in pressuring local administrations and mayors directly, or indirectly through the mediation of local politicians (Gerli, 2021). In this phase, mayors’ public health responsibilities meant that they were authorised to suspend 5G adoption. This battle was fought through on- and offline signature collections, meetings with the authorities, and, when needed, legal means. Here, the knowledge produced by scientific patchwork storytelling played a key role since the point was to convince mayors that there were sufficient scientific grounds to justify the precautionary principle. Local groups informally worked together to gain the scientific and legal expertise needed to generate effective dialogue with the authorities. They also received support from national groups. In this phase the main knowledge authorities for the RKC as a whole were, in fact, researchers at Istituto Ramazzini (with some local groups even organising visits to laboratories) and the AIE, both of whom helped local groups frame their instances and public discourse firmly within the limits of scientific patchwork storytelling. AIE president Dr Paolo Orio, for example, not only gave many public talks on EMFs but he also constantly monitored scientific databases for new peer-reviewed studies confirming the effects of non-ionising radiation. These articles were then posted, together with comments on their significance, on the AIE’s owned space, in national and translocal Stop 5G online groups and other spaces of resonance, where they were intercepted, collected and reposted by local activists in their groups. At a local level, they were often collected and archived in external repositories like Google Drive as lists of links or a collection of PDF files that were then circulated among other groups, together with legal documentation and models of the letters to be written to mayors. These repositories and lists were also used to socialise new members to the knowledge shared by the RKC or to contradict the opposition in online discussions in spaces of confrontation. What was actually at stake here was a fully fledged creation of a canon of symbolic resources assembled through scientific patchwork storytelling that came to summarise and stabilise the knowledge shared by the RKC as a whole.

This twofold strategy proved highly successful. In an article dated 16 July 2020,¹⁷ Wired Italia revealed that 431 mayors and local administrations (the number would grow to 600 in total out of around 8000 Italian municipalities) had halted the deployment of 5G on their territories. Whilst the pandemic crisis sped up this process, an in-depth study by Paolo Gerli (2021) on 5G municipal bans has shown that these moratoria were not related to COVID disinformation (as is often argued by legacy media) but were rather the result of painstaking perseverance by civil society, activists and local politicians that had begun long before. A significant role in this work was played by the capacity of a heterogeneous and decentralised network of activists to open a dialogue with public institutions, keeping its discourse within the limits of scientific patchwork storytelling and avoiding science-related populist stances (Mede & Schafer, 2020) or forms of conspiracism that would have delegitimised their demands.

This was the result of efforts to demarcate the boundaries of RKC discursive production made by its knowledge authorities and by national and local Facebook groups’ administrators acting as gatekeepers. Administrators proved capable not only of defending their online spaces from unwanted intrusion by trolls and comments explicitly advocating acts of sabotage or vandalism against antennas, but also from posts on topics not strictly related to 5G (from chemical trails to vaccines) and from overly controversial sources of knowledge. The regulations of the Stop Sperimentazione 5G group, for example, explicitly stated:

Here quarrelling, rudeness, praising violence and inciting crime is strictly forbidden. Since our ideas vary, arguments on politics or topics other than [5G], such as vaccines, chemical trails and conspiracies, are also strictly forbidden. Before publishing an article, you are requested to verify the trustworthiness of its source. Do not publish articles or videos written or filmed by amateurs, or news that has not yet been verified; this will make us look like flat-earther nut jobs to be mocked and easily dismissed. This is something that our negligence must not allow to happen. We must always be credible and well-informed. If you are not sure about some information, consult scientific data and laws before beginning a dialogue with institutions or scientifically trained people—we want them on our side.

Consequently, although several conspiracy theories regarding 5G were already circulating on the Italian web in 2018 and 2019 (for example, on the use of 5G technologies in a project for mind control called Monarch),¹⁸ they did not permeate the guarded borders of the Stop 5G social world.

Yet, there are two significant exceptions to this form of boundary work in this phase, both strictly centred on scientific patchwork storytelling and framing the deployment of 5G as a health- and environment-related issue, and both of which, as we will see, played a key role during the pandemic phases. The first was an alternative narrative promoted, in particular, by Martucci’s AIS5G in its owned spaces (and then reposted in several spaces of resonance). In this narrative, 5G was framed not (only) as a health risk but as the linchpin in an already ongoing transhumanist transformation of society that promoted pervasive mediated communication and (allegedly) 5G-related technologies, like the Internet of Things, AI and virtual reality, as means of exploitation and social control. Indirectly rebutting the public praise by tech companies and the institutions of the social gains associated with 5G in what has been called a technological drama (Butot & van Zoonen, 2022), this narrative adopted a cultural criticism approach warning against the erosion of social ties, culture, critical thinking and, therefore, freedom that such a transhumanist turn implied. This narrative, that began to resonate in local groups’ private and owned spaces, was fully developed in Martucci’s (2020) book #Stop5G and, as will be seen, rose to prominence during the pandemic crisis.

The second exception was not a fully fledged narrative, but rather an epistemological stance generating a plurality of sub-narratives. It comprised a collective effort to mobilise the (scientific-patchworked) knowledge of the RKC to interpret phenomena observed daily by activists; for example, attributing personally experienced health symptoms and conditions to EMF, searching the urban landscape for new 5G antennas to monitor the deployment process (after learning to recognise them through pictures shared online), but also associating tree cutting to the scientifically based notion that trees are barriers to 5G millimetre waves. This led to formal demands for an end to tree cutting to local institutions and appeals. This epistemological stance broke the immediate connection between the RKC’s shared knowledge and scientific sources prescribed by scientific patchwork storytelling and promoted by scientists as knowledge authorities: during a public conference held in Milan in 2019, for example, one of the convenors projected a video downloaded from the Internet showing dead birds, attributing the event to the activation of a 5G antenna.

As we will see, this epistemological stance, in synergy with the delegitimising narrative that complemented scientific patchwork storytelling, opened the door to a populist and, not infrequently, conspiratorial turn during the pandemic crisis.

5.3.3 Enter the Virus (February–April 2020)

The pandemic crisis marked a radical transformation in the structure of the RKC and its broader arena, media ecosystem and discursive practices. From a communicative point of view, these months registered a crackdown against the circulation of controversial COVID-19-related knowledge in the media. In April 2020, for example, AGCOM, the Italian Communications Regulatory Authority, began applying severe restrictions and cancelled several controversial TV programmes and channels. Concomitantly, all the main platforms enforced stricter content moderation policies, including demonetisation and deplatformisation. In this scenario, the virus was a key actant in the definition of the RKC discursive production situation and within its ecosystem and the primary work of local activist groups in physical spaces, such as conferences, weekly leafleting and signature collection, was suddenly suspended. This weakened the relevance of locally owned communication spaces used for coordination in favour of national and translocal online groups enjoying a wider (and quickly increasing) audience: these groups soon became the centre of the activists’ media territories.

COVID-19 took the limelight in discursive terms as well: participants were soon engaged in never-ending collective discussions seeking to make sense of the new situation. Encouraged by insistent (fake) news about the concurrence of 5G adoption in Wuhan and the outbreak of the epidemic (news that was also reposted by Gunter Pauli,¹⁹ economic advisor to the then-Italian President of the Council Giuseppe Conte, in a tweet that was interpreted by the activist groups as an authoritative confirmation), activists saw the ongoing pandemic crisis from the vantage point of their shared knowledge on EMF, adopting the epistemological stance already well established in the previous phase. Several authors have described speculation on the correlation between 5G and COVID-19 in conspiracy theory terms (Bruns et al., 2020; Gagliardone et al., 2021; Meese et al., 2020). Yet, this seems to apply only in cases promoting the nonexistence of the virus and its use by the authorities as a cover story to hide what was actually an upsurge in a severe 5G-induced electromagnetic condition, as was claimed by alternative medicine practitioner and antivaxer Thomas Cowan in a video that was widely circulated on Facebook before being removed. This hypothesis, whilst present in activists’ discussions, was rejected as antiscientific by the majority of the RKC’s members, who tended to explain the situation in terms of a population left more vulnerable to infection due to the effects of 5G electromagnetic radiation on the immune system.

This hypothesis was compatible with the canon of scientific literature collected by the RKC,²⁰ yet it was not directly addressed and supported by it. In this way, the epistemic line drawn by scientific patchwork storytelling began to be crossed, and this increased when the groups’ participants started to find new knowledge authorities elsewhere as a basis for their claims. This was the case for catalysts of scientific dissent such as Claudio Messora (whose official channel ByoBlu was first demonetised and then shut down by YouTube in March 2021) and Rudolf Steiner, founder of anthroposophy and main reference point for Dr Cowan. In particular, Steiner was credited for attributing huge epidemic outbreaks to the progressive electrification of the planet. Meanwhile, group admins were struggling to exert their authority as gatekeepers and keeping discussions strictly focused on 5G- and EMF-related issues, resorting to public reprimands and content deletion, partly due to fears that a platform increasingly perceived as hostile might sanction or remove their online spaces.

5.3.4 The Populist Turn and the Adoption of Syncretic Patchwork Storytelling (The Remainder of 2020)

The most radical changes in the RKC’s discursive knowledge construction practices were initiated precisely by an abrupt turnaround in online groups moderation. In late March-early April, the unrest caused by strict governmental virus containment policies, a shared perception of increasing control in legacy media and social platforms, and social alarm triggered by news of experimentation on a new class of SARS-CoV-2 vaccines convinced the admins of a growing number of local, translocal and national groups to cease filtering non-5G-related contents and even share this content themselves. When asked about a shift that led many groups to—in some cases, completely—shift their focus from 5G, activists answered that there were now more pressing issues at hand or that the 5G battle had to be seen as part of a much broader clash with technocapitalism.

While the narratives characterising the previous phase persisted, and scientific literature on the dangers of 5G was still posted, a plurality of themes coming from different sources was now being shared in the RKC’s owned spaces in an attempt to make sense of a rapidly evolving situation. These themes ranged from new age spirituality and the beneficial effects of 7.83 Hz vibration (disrupted by EMF) to the relationship between facemasks and blood acidification (which exacerbated the dangerous effects of EMF and 5G), sociological warnings about the radicalisation of surveillance capitalism, dystopias revolving around supposedly 5G-enabled technologies like AI, virtual statements about the DNA-altering proprieties of new vaccines and considerations on the artificial nature of the virus.

Reports of ongoing censorship, content deletion and deplatformisation were also a significant component of the mix, leading users to adopt measures to circumvent algorithmic content moderation based on assumptions, or ‘folk theories’ (DeVito et al., 2017; Moran et al., 2022; Myers West, 2018), on how such algorithms work. Several groups were renamed, for example, to avoid automatic detection, and potentially troublesome keywords were encrypted (the word Vax was replaced by the word Cax, e.g.). The media territories of various groups were reconfigured through migration from WhatsApp to Telegram, which was considered ‘freer’ and more ‘secure’ (migration from Facebook to platforms like VK was often discussed but never really put in place). Interestingly, users also started to save cultural artefacts (like Dr Cowan’s videos) in external shared repositories like Google Drive to preserve them from deletion and share them with other users. This practice ultimately assembled a new eclectic canon of heterogeneous resources that replaced the old scientific literature-based canon.

The transformation of the discursive practices of a large part of the RKC was more radical, however, and cannot be described simply in terms of this new thematic eclecticism. Especially in bigger groups, collective discussion of posts shared was replaced with what might be called ‘flow communication’: users started constantly reposting links, videos, memes and other cultural artefacts from a heterogeneous variety of sources, selecting contents that captured their attention in spaces of resonance proposed to them by platform algorithms, or received directly from their contacts, including on WhatsApp. Content was now simply juxtaposed to other content, and links were not infrequently reposted and cross-posted many times by different, or even the same, users. This form of syncretic patchwork storytelling assumed forms closely resembling transmedia swarming storytelling, as described in Sect. 5.2. Rather than a collectively negotiated ‘grand master’ (see above, Sect. 5.2), groups hosted a considerable number of modular micronarratives, pieces of information, speculations and hypotheses, each constituting an ‘access point … to different stories’ that users themselves assembled following links and finding connections, with ‘shared perspectives [creating] clusters of narratives and plots that [generated] more engagement and [were] more commented [on]’ (Bisoni et al., 2013, p. 20).

Some narrative clusters in this vast interconnected discursive ecosystem replicated conspiracy theories, 5G-related and otherwise, as they have already been described by recent literature focusing on the pandemic crisis (Birchall & Knight, 2023; Fuchs, 2021), featuring depopulation plans, Big Pharma, the inoculation of 5G-operated microchips for mass control (or, alternatively, for population reduction), for example, and other hidden malevolent plans hatched by hidden powers. Other conspiracy theories, by contrast, were filtered out by RKC’s members’ ‘perspectives’. QAnon-related speculations, for example, never really took off within this communicative flow while they circulated in other Italian ecosystems, even encapsulating micronarratives on 5G (Murru, 2022).

Other narrative clusters, however, were associated with perspectives that leaned more towards scientific and political populism than conspiracy theories. This was the case, in particular, of the cultural criticism approach against transhumanism promoted by Martucci’s AIS5G, then coming to the fore. In this narrative, the economic elites, whose interests were naturally opposed to those of the common people, were acting with the complicity of the political health authorities to take advantage of the pandemic crisis and speed up the adoption of technologies leading to a future of radical exploitation, social engineering and erosion of freedom. This narrative became politically more radical, particularly after the government issued Decree-Law no. 78 of 16 July 2020, which deprived mayors of the power to suspend 5G adoption in their territories, initiating an institutional and legal battle with local government that is still going on. Backed by a significant part of the network of the ‘catalysts of scientific dissent’ and the Stop 5G RKC, Martucci spent the months which followed on denouncing an ongoing ‘electromagnetic coup d’etat’ and urging ‘the people’ to mobilise. Elsewhere (Bory et al., 2023), we have described how the hegemony of this overarching populist narrative and the adoption of a syncretic approach fostered the confluence of a part of the Stop 5G activist movement (the one closer to AIS5G) into R2020, a new political entity made up of various RKCs connected via networks, and representing instances of this discontent.

Some of the groups that adopted the form of syncretic patchwork storytelling described above definitively moved away from a focus on 5G and EMF, de facto leaving the RKC; this was the case, for example, of the Italian WhatsApp group No Elettrosmog, which now mainly discusses vaccines, the Ukrainian crisis (with a prevalently pro-Putin stance), and issues featured in legacy media as their main agenda setters. Other groups, such as Stop 5G Italia, slowly regained their focus, and others never adopted the new discursive practice, such as the AIE online group, which stuck to scientific patchwork storytelling and its treatment of the 5G theme as a health and environmental issue. In so doing it regained its pre-pandemic knowledge authority role within the RKC, leading many groups back to their focus.

5.4 Conclusion

The purpose of this chapter has been to shed light on the co-constitutive relationship between RKCs as social worlds and their shared knowledge. To this end, I adopted an ecological approach to address the situatedness of the Stop 5G RKC discursive shared knowledge construction practices and the role played by the media, both legacy and digital, in these same practices. This required taking a non-media-centric approach to media (Morley, 2009) which sought to consider all the main heterogeneous elements tangled up in the RKC’s discursive situations, thereby contributing to shaping its shared knowledge. Moreover, the adoption of a diachronic perspective was crucial to the attempt to clarify the process by which these can be de-stabilised and re-stabilised in new configurations with the inclusion of new entities, regarding which my focus was on the role played by SARS-CoV-2.

The case study in this chapter allows two orders of observation to be made. The first of these concerns the close interaction between the RKC’s socio-structural and socio-symbolic levels. On one hand, specific organisational forms have proved highly significant to the enabling of specific shared knowledge production practices—contributing in this way to shaping the knowledge shared by the RKC. For example, in its activist phase—when a growing number of laypeople entered the social world, drawn in by the growing visibility of the EMF issue in legacy media—the Stop 5G RKC was able to retain a stable discursive scientific patchwork storytelling practice, on the strength of an especially efficient organisational structure in both discursive gatekeeping and new members socialisation terms. As we have seen, this structure consisted of a network of informal local activist groups and a few national associations—many of which were under the leadership of those with scientific backgrounds or expertise, such as ISDE or AIE—mediating collaboration with independent scientists. On the other hand, transformations at the socio-symbolic level proved highly significant in fostering some forms of structural reorganisation. During the pandemic crisis, for example, the adoption of an unprecedented scientific populism in the 5G strategy and a syncretic approach to knowledge production paved the way for the convergence of a large part of the RKC in the broader political entity, R2020. At the same time, this also threatened to disrupt the RKC, causing several groups to lose their focus on 5G-related issues.

The second order of observations regards the role played by the media, both legacy and social, in the heterogeneous entanglements of the situations of discursive production. This is still an understudied topic, as a large part of the literature on the mediated circulation of knowledge refused by the scientific community focuses on the effects of users’ exposure to fake scientific news and scientific misinformation (as these controversial pieces of information are more commonly and less symmetrically referred to within media studies) addressed using a behaviouralist ‘powerful media effects’ approach (Tosoni, 2021). As our case study shows, three main inextricably intertwined digital media roles can be identified in this RKC’s production and circulation of refused knowledge: its role as an interactional infrastructure, as a vast interconnected repository of contents and symbolic resources (IDE, interconnected discursive ecosystem), and as a fully fledged player in the RKC’s arena.

Regarding the role of (digital) media as interactional infrastructure, it should be noted that the RKC assembles specific and recurring media ensembles with which to perform its discursive practices (what we have defined as ‘media territories’). For example, the media territories of local activist groups are structured in private WhatsApp groups and owned Facebook groups complementing offline meetings by hosting shared knowledge production discursive practices. What is significant about this is not only the multi-sited (Marcus, 1995) nature of the RKC’s discursive practices but also how a shift in these same discursive practices entails a reconfiguration of their media territories, as the RKC’s turn from scientific to syncretic patchwork storytelling shows. Moreover, it can be observed that the RKC’s members share a sort of ‘symbolic map’ of their media ecosystem, distinguishing their owned spaces into private and public, and non-owned spaces into friendly (‘spaces of resonance’) and hostile (‘spaces of confrontation’) and members’ discursive practices may thus vary accordingly. We have seen, for example, how it was in private and resonance spaces that activists drew on the RKC’s shared knowledge to make scientifically unfounded interpretations of everyday phenomena heard about on the Internet, such as ascribing a substantial number of bird deaths and tree cutting to 5G adoption.

Regarding the role of the media as a vast interconnected repository of symbolic resources (IDE, interconnected discursive ecosystem), the RKC’s members actively searched the Internet for cultural artefacts conveying these resources, and came into contact with them through re-posts by other users acting as grassroots intermediaries (Jenkins et al., 2013) or via the intermediation of platforms’ algorithms. It should be noted, however, that the distinction between media as repositories and media as interactional infrastructure is not clear-cut. In particular, the RKC’s members adapted their content production to the narratives of other players in the same arena, engaging them in a sort of mediated indirect interaction. Vivien Butot & Liesbet van Zoonen (2022), for example, drew on Bryan Pfaffenberger’s (1992) concept of ‘technological drama’ to describe the interplay between 5G discourses enacted by ‘design constituencies’ (e.g. the European Commission, tech companies and other public and private entities) and ‘ ‘impact constituencies’ who [organised] on Facebook to oppose … 5G’ (Butot & van Zoonen 2022, p. 1). This drama was staged via ‘news media as ambivalent intermediaries’ and ‘in front of audiences who [became] part of the scene’ (p. 6). In our case study, we observed this form of indirect interaction during the pandemic crisis when the cultural critique approach to 5G opposition became dominant. Addressing the situatedness of the RKC’s discursive production of shared beliefs, therefore, means considering the symbolic resources available to it, as well as their complex interaction.

Finally, the RKC’s members viewed legacy media and social media platforms as fully fledged players in their arena, by and large with an adversarial role. In particular, in a reversal of the trend by which the Internet is represented as a free speech space (and juxtaposed to state-controlled legacy media), mainstream platforms such as Facebook and YouTube began increasingly to be perceived as hostile after they tightened their content moderation policies during the pandemic crisis. Notably, these perceptions contributed to shaping the RKC’s current discursive production practices (and therefore its shared knowledge), probably to a greater extent than the platforms’ direct interventions—e.g. labelling some content as unverified or deleting it outright. As several authors have noted (DeVito et al., 2017; Moran et al., 2022; Myers West, 2018), people engaging with controversial content drew upon their previous experiences and observations to develop folk theories on the functioning of moderation algorithms in the platforms they employed, adapting their online behaviour to circumvent gatekeeping. In our case study, we saw, for example, that during the pandemic members of the RKC archived cultural artefacts that they considered at risk of automatic cancellation in online repositories which eventually canonised some of the narratives assembled through syncretic patchwork storytelling.