Syria in Transition
Mapping Conspiracy Theorists on Social Media
📌 From Telegram to Facebook and Instagram — who is fueling conspiracy theories after Assad's fall?
📌 Developing custom data scraping tools to bypass Meta restrictions and map narratives before and after the regime collapse.
📌 Extracting nearly 37,000 posts from 179 Instagram accounts.
📌 Exposing the roles of "local media," "external Assad loyalists," and "foreign actors seeking influence in Syria's future."
Arabi Facts Hub has released a new open-source research that reveals the networks promoting conspiracy theories in Syria after the fall of the Assad regime. The findings are based on data scraped from Telegram, Facebook, and Instagram.
🧠 The research, titled "Syria in Transition: Who's Fueling Conspiracy Theories on Social Media?Mapping Conspiracy Theorists on Social Media", was initially inspired by an article from the Middle East Institute, which discussed the forms of disinformation emerging in Syria's current transitional period—particularly on Telegram.
🔎 Recognizing Meta platforms like Facebook and Instagram pose a greater risk for spreading misinformation, our research team at Arabi Facts Hub developed specialized data scrapers to bypass Meta's restrictions and uncover the networked spread of conspiracy narratives following Assad's fall.
🕸 The study focused on Facebook accounts during the two months before and after the regime's collapse, revealing three major clusters of conspiracy networks: State media and official government pages, which once promoted Assad and quickly pivoted to support the new government.
🕸 External Assad loyalists who were shocked by the fall and continue to push pro-regime content, And Foreign government-linked accounts attempting to shape Syria's transitional trajectory.
📊 The research also analyzed 36,833 posts from 179 Instagram accounts, mapped along the Syria–Palestine media space, to investigate the overlap between pro-Palestine activism and the propagation of conspiracy narratives linking Israel and Western powers to Assad's downfall—potentially swaying public opinion against the new Syrian regime.
📥 To explore the full findings and see the mapped network of conspiracy promoters in Syria, visit our website:
