{"paper":{"title":"Stranger Danger! Cross-Community Interactions with Fringe Users Increase the Growth of Fringe Communities on Reddit","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":["cs.AI"],"primary_cat":"cs.SI","authors_text":"Giuseppe Russo, Manoel Horta Ribeiro, Robert West","submitted_at":"2023-10-18T07:26:36Z","abstract_excerpt":"Fringe communities promoting conspiracy theories and extremist ideologies have thrived on mainstream platforms, raising questions about the mechanisms driving their growth. Here, we hypothesize and study a possible mechanism: new members may be recruited through fringe-interactions: the exchange of comments between members and non-members of fringe communities. We apply text-based causal inference techniques to study the impact of fringe-interactions on the growth of three prominent fringe communities on Reddit: r/Incel, r/GenderCritical, and r/The_Donald. Our results indicate that fringe-inte"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2310.12186","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2310.12186/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}