“The government spies using our webcams:” The language of conspiracy theories in online discussions

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 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” appears in diverse conspiratorial statements alleging that governmental agencies control information to nefarious ends. 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.