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arXiv · 2111.02187

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

Pujan Paudel·Jeremy Blackburn·Emiliano De Cristofaro·Savvas Zannettou·Gianluca Stringhini
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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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Pujan Paudel, Jeremy Blackburn, Emiliano De Cristofaro, Savvas Zannettou, Gianluca Stringhini. 2021-11-03. Soros, Child Sacrifices, and 5G: Understanding the Spread of Conspiracy Theories on Web Communities. https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.02187

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