'The Government Spies Using Our Webcams'

Abstract

Conspiracy theories are omnipresent in online discussions---whether to explain a late-breaking event that still lacks official report or to give voice to political dissent. Conspiracy theories evolve, multiply, and interconnect, further complicating efforts to understand them and to limit their propagation. It is therefore crucial to develop scalable methods to examine the nature of conspiratorial discussions in online communities. What do users talk about when they discuss conspiracy theories online? What are the recurring elements in their discussions? What do these elements tell us about the way users think? This work answers these questions by analyzing over ten years of discussions in r/conspiracy---an online community on Reddit dedicated to conspiratorial discussions. We focus on the key elements of a conspiracy theory: the conspiratorial agents, the actions they perform, and their targets. By computationally detecting agent?action?target triplets in conspiratorial statements, and grouping them into semantically coherent clusters, we develop a notion of narrative-motif to detect recurring patterns of triplets. For example, a narrative-motif such as "governmental agency-controls-communications" represents the various ways in which multiple conspiratorial statements denote how governmental agencies control information. Thus, narrative-motifs expose commonalities between multiple conspiracy theories even when they refer to different events or circumstances. In the process, these representations help us understand how users talk about conspiracy theories and offer us a means to interpret what they talk about. Our approach enables a population-scale study of conspiracy theories in alternative news and social media with implications for understanding their adoption and combating their spread.

Measuring the diffusion of conspiracy theories in digital information ecologies

“…Topic models trained on a pre-defined, CT-specific corpus can give insight into the issues discussed (Maier et al, 2018b: 6) across time, while inferring CTs from topic model classifications based on a broader corpus is more difficult. Narrative detection in CTs (Samory and Mitra, 2018b; Shahsavari et al, 2020) allows for a deeper understanding of CT construction while maintaining the possibility of cross-topical analysis. To bridge the trade-off between actor and content-focused methods, there have been advances to combine topic modeling and network analysis to measure CT (Rauchfleisch and Kaiser, 2020b) or issue salience (Maier et al, 2018b) on an actor level.…”

“…The issue remains that the bag-of-words approach underlying topic modeling does not accurately represent the interrelated narrative construct of a CT. CTs are conceptualized as narratives, and an approach specifically designed to capture the key narrative pattern of CTs has been proposed by Samory and Mitra (2018b). First, the authors extracted topics from a dataset comprising all submissions and comments in the r/conspiracy subreddit on Reddit (from 2008 to 2017) with a specific topic modeling procedure (Samory and Mitra, 2018b: 6–8). Second, the conspiratorial agents, the actions they perform, and their targets (aims) are understood as key conceptual elements of a CT and computationally detected as ‘agent-action-target triplets in conspiratorial statements’.…”

“…Empirically, the agent-action-target-construct is operationalized as subject-verb-object triplets and measured via word embeddings and clustering procedures. Based on the overarching narrative-motif for triplets within a cluster (Samory and Mitra, 2018b: 6–10), the authors report the salience of CTs, the narrative construction or framing within CTs, and their overlap.…”

The Social Construction of Conspiracy Beliefs: A Q-Methodology Study of How Ordinary People Define Them and Judge Their Plausibility

“…A second perspective is that conspiracy beliefs can be identified by particular narrative features or tropes and this is a more common approach in cultural and literary studies (Butter & Knight, 2019), some psychological work (Byford, 2011) and information science (Samory & Mitra, 2018). The focus in this perspective is less on doxastic aspects of conspiracy beliefs but, rather, their narrative form (e.g., the presence of identified conspirators and secret plots) and they may be viewed as more widespread in society, endorsed by more people and with a range of functions, including entertainment (e.g., TV series like The X-Files).…”

Identity‐Based Motivation and the Logic of Conversations Obfuscate Loss of Online Privacy and What Policy‐Makers Can Do About It

“…It is also not closely linked to the sequence of behaviors involved in most goal-directed online interactions. Indeed, except for fringe actors endorsing political conspiracy theories (Samory & Mitra, 2018) and dissidents in authoritarian regimes (Hahn & Layne-Farrar, 2002) there are few noncriminal online activities where the core goal of the activity is likely to bring large-scale information tracking and pooling to mind.…”