Research
Measuring the Semantic Structure and Evolution of Conspiracy Theories
arXiv:2603.26062v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Research on conspiracy theories has largely focused on belief formation, exposure, and diffusion, while paying less attention to how their meanings
arXiv:2603.26062v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: 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 conspiracy theories to be treated as semantic objects. We then track how these objects evolve over time using aligned word embeddings, enabling comparisons of semantic neighborhoods across periods. Our analysis reveals that conspiracy theories evolve non-uniformly, exhibiting patterns of semantic stability, expansion, contraction, and replacement that are not captured by keyword-based approaches alone.
Related
- CIG: Measuring Conversational Information Gain in Deliberative Dialogues with Semantic Memory Dynamics
- HistLens: Mapping Idea Change across Concepts and Corpora
- Linguistic Accommodation Between Neurodivergent Communities on Reddit:A Communication Accommodation Theory Analysis of ADHD and Autism Groups
Source: arXiv cs.CL | 2026-04-20