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

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

URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2111.02187v1
Date: Wed, 3 Nov 2021 12:52:10 GMT
Title: Soros, Child Sacrifices, and 5G: Understanding the Spread of Conspiracy Theories on Web Communities
Authors: Pujan Paudel, Jeremy Blackburn, Emiliano De Cristofaro, Savvas Zannettou, and Gianluca Stringhini
Abstract summary: We find 66k posts and 277k comments on Reddit, and 379k tweets discussing conspiracy theories. Our analysis sheds light on how conspiracy theories are discussed and spread online, while highlighting multiple challenges in mitigating them.
Score: 11.319938541673578
License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
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.

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