Soros, Child Sacrifices, and 5G: Understanding the Spread of Conspiracy Theories on Web Communities
Pujan Paudel, Jeremy Blackburn, Emiliano De Cristofaro, Savvas, Zannettou, and Gianluca Stringhini

TL;DR
This study develops a computational pipeline to analyze how conspiracy theories are discussed and spread across various online communities, revealing influential platforms and challenges in mitigation.
Contribution
It introduces a multi-platform pipeline using Snopes claims to identify and analyze conspiracy discussions across Reddit and Twitter, highlighting community influence and dissemination patterns.
Findings
66k Reddit posts and 277k comments on conspiracy theories
379k tweets discussing conspiracy claims
Identification of influential communities in spreading conspiracies
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.
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsMisinformation and Its Impacts · Spam and Phishing Detection · Hate Speech and Cyberbullying Detection
