Mainstream visibility after Epstein's death selected for users who stayed less and talked less like core members, pointing to selection rather than simple amplification in conspiracy community growth.
Among Us: Language of Conspiracy Theorists on Mainstream Reddit
2 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.
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Pith papers citing it
abstract
The interaction between fringe subcultures and mainstream online communities poses significant challenges for understanding discourse on social media. In this work, we investigate whether users active in conspiracy-focused communities exhibit detectable linguistic signatures when participating in general-interest spaces, such as news, humor, or hobbyist forums. We analyze a large-scale longitudinal dataset of over 500 million comments spanning 10 years of Reddit activity, examining the communication patterns of these users across diverse social contexts independent of the topics they discuss. We show that these users exhibit distinctive linguistic patterns that enable machine learning models to reliably distinguish them from the general population within individual communities (averaging 87\% accuracy across more than 20 binary classification tasks). Crucially, no single aggregate model captures these patterns across communities, as community-specific models outperform global classifiers by up to 17 percentage points. This result suggests that while these users are distinct, their linguistic expression is dynamic and highly responsive to the social norms of the environment they inhabit. Our findings suggest the need for tailored interventions in online spaces, as linguistic signals associated with conspiracy and fringe subcultures vary across communities and cannot be effectively addressed by uniform detection or moderation strategies.
years
2025 2representative citing papers
LLM agents calibrated on Italian election data produce coherent posts and realistic network structure but show less tone and toxicity variation than real users, with opinion changes resembling traditional mathematical models.
citing papers explorer
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Effects of Algorithmic Visibility on Conspiracy Communities: Reddit after Epstein's 'Suicide'
Mainstream visibility after Epstein's death selected for users who stayed less and talked less like core members, pointing to selection rather than simple amplification in conspiracy community growth.
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Simulating Online Social Media Conversations on Controversial Topics Using AI Agents Calibrated on Real-World Data
LLM agents calibrated on Italian election data produce coherent posts and realistic network structure but show less tone and toxicity variation than real users, with opinion changes resembling traditional mathematical models.