Soros, Child Sacrifices, and 5G: Understanding the Spread of Conspiracy Theories on Web Communities

Abstract

This paper presents a multi-platform computational pipeline geared to identify social media posts discussing (known) conspiracy theories. We use 189 conspiracy claims collected by Snopes, and find 66k posts and 277k comments on Reddit, and 379k tweets discussing them. Then, we study how conspiracies are discussed on different Web communities and which ones are particularly influential in driving the discussion about them. Our analysis sheds light on how conspiracy theories are discussed and spread online, while highlighting multiple challenges in mitigating them.

References in corpus (5)

• Science vs Conspiracy: collective narratives in the age of (mis)information
• An automated pipeline for the discovery of conspiracy and conspiracy theory narrative frameworks: Bridgegate, Pizzagate and storytelling on the web
• Scalable Bayesian Inference for Excitatory Point Process Networks
• Misinformation Warning Labels: Twitter's Soft Moderation Effects on COVID-19 Vaccine Belief Echoes
• "I Won the Election!": An Empirical Analysis of Soft Moderation Interventions on Twitter