Coronavirus meets the clash of civilizations

Conspiracy Theories (CTs) are a global phenomenon, but some societies are better equipped than others to resist them. This article discusses the characteristics of the China-related COVID-19 CTs in Brazilian Facebook, based on 28,312 posts published from January 2020 to June 2021. The authors argue that, in Brazil, the spread of CTs was facilitated by a widespread political and knowledge institutions’ legitimacy crisis. A significant presence of actors belonging to mainstream politics and the media were among the main disseminators of these conspiracy theories.