Conspiracy thinking sprang up strongly during the COVID-19 pandemic. Portugal presents itself as an important context to analyze such relation because it attracted a diverse array of protests and mobilizations inspired on such conspiracy theories and performed in the country’s main cities (i.e., Lisbon, Porto, and Coimbra) during the COVID-19 pandemic. Social media have been a privileged avenue to disseminate such protests through Facebook groups and other social networks, while several conspiracy theories have occupied the forefront of diverse Facebook posts in order to make sense of the pandemic’s causes and related sanitary control measures (e.g., lockdown, social distancing, mask use, testing, vaccination). This article delves into three concrete endeavors: (1) an incursion on the links between modern conspiracy theories, health concerns, and popular/civic protests; (2) a problematization of protests and mobilizations against COVID-19 control measures beyond the laypeople conspiracy hypothesis, but rather as the constitution and expression of an ideological space prone to the contemporary renewal of a spurious far-right alternative subjectivity; and (3) a content analysis of the social media platform related to the organization and dissemination of several protests and mobilizations, while taking the timeline of June 2020 until August 2021 in Portugal. Based on such analysis, some more detailed accounts on the contemporary articulation of such ideological space, within the context of COVID-19 pandemic, are finally suggested.

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