Measuring the Semantic Structure and Evolution of Conspiracy Theories
Research on conspiracy theories has largely focused on belief formation, exposure, and diffusion, while paying less attention to how their meanings change over time. This gap persists partly because conspiracy-related terms are often treated as stable lexical markers, making it difficult to separate genuine semantic changes from surface-level vocabulary changes. In this paper, we measure the semantic structure and evolution of conspiracy theories in online political discourse. Using 169.9M comments from Reddit's r/politics subreddit spanning 2012--2022, we first demonstrate that conspiracy-related language forms coherent and semantically distinguishable regions of language space, allowing...
| Authors | Manisha Keim, Sarmad Chandio, Osama Khalid et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 27 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 17 April 2026 |
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