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

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.