Among Us: Language of Conspiracy Theorists on Mainstream Reddit

TL;DR

This study analyzes Reddit comments over 10 years to identify linguistic signatures of conspiracy theorists across diverse online communities, revealing that their language patterns are distinct and context-dependent.

Contribution

It demonstrates that conspiracy-oriented users exhibit detectable, community-specific linguistic patterns, challenging the effectiveness of global detection models.

Findings

Linguistic patterns of conspiracy users enable 87% accuracy in classification.

Community-specific models outperform global classifiers by up to 17%.

Linguistic signals vary significantly across different online communities.

Abstract

The interaction between fringe subcultures and mainstream online communities poses significant challenges for understanding discourse on social media. In this work, we investigate whether users active in conspiracy-focused communities exhibit detectable linguistic signatures when participating in general-interest spaces, such as news, humor, or hobbyist forums. We analyze a large-scale longitudinal dataset of over 500 million comments spanning 10 years of Reddit activity, examining the communication patterns of these users across diverse social contexts independent of the topics they discuss. We show that these users exhibit distinctive linguistic patterns that enable machine learning models to reliably distinguish them from the general population within individual communities (averaging 87\% accuracy across more than 20 binary classification tasks). Crucially, no single aggregate model captures these patterns across communities, as community-specific models outperform global classifiers by up to 17 percentage points. This result suggests that while these users are distinct, their linguistic expression is dynamic and highly responsive to the social norms of the environment they inhabit. Our findings suggest the need for tailored interventions in online spaces, as linguistic signals associated with conspiracy and fringe subcultures vary across communities and cannot be effectively addressed by uniform detection or moderation strategies.