Pathways through Conspiracy: The Evolution of Conspiracy Radicalization through Engagement in Online Conspiracy Discussions

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2204.10729v1
• Date: Fri, 22 Apr 2022 14:31:53 GMT
• Title: Pathways through Conspiracy: The Evolution of Conspiracy Radicalization through Engagement in Online Conspiracy Discussions
• Authors: Shruti Phadke, Mattia Samory, Tanushree Mitra
• Abstract summary: This paper provides the empirical modeling of various radicalization phases in online conspiracy theory discussion participants. By studying 36K users through their 169M contributions, we uncover four distinct pathways of conspiracy engagement. Specific sub-populations of users, namely those on steady high and increasing conspiracy engagement pathways, progress successively through various radicalization stages.
• Score: 9.410583483182657
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
• Abstract: The disruptive offline mobilization of participants in online conspiracy theory (CT) discussions has highlighted the importance of understanding how online users may form radicalized conspiracy beliefs. While prior work researched the factors leading up to joining online CT discussions and provided theories of how conspiracy beliefs form, we have little understanding of how conspiracy radicalization evolves after users join CT discussion communities. In this paper, we provide the empirical modeling of various radicalization phases in online CT discussion participants. To unpack how conspiracy engagement is related to radicalization, we first characterize the users' journey through CT discussions via conspiracy engagement pathways. Specifically, by studying 36K Reddit users through their 169M contributions, we uncover four distinct pathways of conspiracy engagement: steady high, increasing, decreasing, and steady low. We further model three successive stages of radicalization guided by prior theoretical works. Specific sub-populations of users, namely those on steady high and increasing conspiracy engagement pathways, progress successively through various radicalization stages. In contrast, users on the decreasing engagement pathway show distinct behavior: they limit their CT discussions to specialized topics, participate in diverse discussion groups, and show reduced conformity with conspiracy subreddits. By examining users who disengage from online CT discussions, this paper provides promising insights about conspiracy recovery process.

Related papers

• Classifying Conspiratorial Narratives At Scale: False Alarms and Erroneous Connections [4.594855794205588]
  This work establishes a general scheme for classifying discussions related to conspiracy theories. We leverage human-labeled ground truth to train a BERT-based model for classifying online CTs. We present the first large-scale classification study using posts from the most active conspiracy-related Reddit forums.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-03-29T20:29:12Z)
• "Here's Your Evidence": False Consensus in Public Twitter Discussions of COVID-19 Science [50.08057052734799]
  We estimate scientific consensus based on samples of abstracts from preprint servers. We find that anti-consensus posts and users, though overall less numerous than pro-consensus ones, are vastly over-represented on Twitter.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-01-24T06:16:57Z)
• The Conspiracy Money Machine: Uncovering Telegram's Conspiracy Channels and their Profit Model [50.80312055220701]
  We discover that conspiracy channels can be clustered into four distinct communities comprising over 17,000 channels. We find conspiracy theorists leverage e-commerce platforms to sell questionable products or lucratively promote them through affiliate links. We conclude that this business involves hundreds of thousands of donors and generates a turnover of almost $66 million.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-10-24T16:25:52Z)
• The Anatomy of Conspirators: Unveiling Traits using a Comprehensive Twitter Dataset [0.0]
  We present a novel methodology for constructing a Twitter dataset that encompasses accounts engaged in conspiracy-related activities throughout the year 2022. This comprehensive collection effort yielded a total of 15K accounts and 37M tweets extracted from their timelines. We conduct a comparative analysis of the two groups across three dimensions: topics, profiles, and behavioral characteristics.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-08-29T09:35:23Z)
• DEBACER: a method for slicing moderated debates [55.705662163385966]
  Partitioning debates into blocks with the same subject is essential for understanding. We propose a new algorithm, DEBACER, which partitions moderated debates.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2021-12-10T10:39:07Z)
• Where the Earth is flat and 9/11 is an inside job: A comparative algorithm audit of conspiratorial information in web search results [62.997667081978825]
  We examine the distribution of conspiratorial information in search results across five search engines: Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo and Yandex. We find that all search engines except Google consistently displayed conspiracy-promoting results and returned links to conspiracy-dedicated websites in their top results. Most conspiracy-promoting results came from social media and conspiracy-dedicated websites while conspiracy-debunking information was shared by scientific websites and, to a lesser extent, legacy media.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2021-12-02T14:29:21Z)
• Soros, Child Sacrifices, and 5G: Understanding the Spread of Conspiracy Theories on Web Communities [11.319938541673578]
  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.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2021-11-03T12:52:10Z)
• Characterizing Social Imaginaries and Self-Disclosures of Dissonance in Online Conspiracy Discussion Communities [8.680081568962997]
  This paper characterizes self-disclosures of dissonance about QAnon, a conspiracy theory initiated by a mysterious leader Q. We focus on 2K posts from two image boards, 4chan and 8chan, and 1.2 M comments and posts from 12 subreddits dedicated to QAnon. We find that self-disclosures of dissonance correlate with a significant decrease in user contributions and ultimately with their departure from the community.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2021-07-21T16:49:21Z)
• How do climate change skeptics engage with opposing views? Understanding mechanisms of social identity and cognitive dissonance in an online forum [0.0]
  We study the impact of opposing views within a major climate change skeptic online community on Reddit. We find that ideologically dissonant submissions act as a stimulant to activity in the community. Users who engaged with dissonant submissions were also more likely to return to the forum.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2021-02-12T13:39:00Z)
• The Truth is Out There: Investigating Conspiracy Theories in Text Generation [66.01545519772527]
  We investigate the propensity for language models to generate conspiracy theory text. Our study focuses on testing these models for the elicitation of conspiracy theories. We introduce a new dataset consisting of conspiracy theory topics, machine-generated conspiracy theories, and human-written conspiracy theories.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2021-01-02T05:47:39Z)
• Echo Chambers on Social Media: A comparative analysis [64.2256216637683]
  We introduce an operational definition of echo chambers and perform a massive comparative analysis on 1B pieces of contents produced by 1M users on four social media platforms. We infer the leaning of users about controversial topics and reconstruct their interaction networks by analyzing different features. We find support for the hypothesis that platforms implementing news feed algorithms like Facebook may elicit the emergence of echo-chambers.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2020-04-20T20:00:27Z)

This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.

This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.