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Due to the Internet, conspiracy theories are on the rise and playing an increasingly significant role in global politics. Now new research from The Australian National University (ANU) has analysed digital data to reveal exactly who is propagating them and why.
Lead researcher Dr Colin Klein of the ANU School of Philosophy said that conspiracies such as Pizzagate (which falsely claimed high-ranking Democratic Party officials were running a child-sex ring out of a pizza shop) and the anti-vaccination movement are becoming a bigger issue.
Dr Klein and his team used a huge, publicly available dataset of every comment made on the conspiracy section of the world's largest discussion website Reddit from 2007 to mid-2015 to work out exactly who was taking part in spreading these conspiracies and why. He was surprised by the results.
The analysis showed that most conspiracies built traction when a range of different people and groups could connect it to their own preconceived beliefs or agendas.
http://www.anu.edu.au/news/all-news/anu-study-reveals-who-is-spreading-online-conspiracies
[Also Covered By]: Phys.org
[Paper]: Topic Modeling Reveals Distinct Interests within an Online Conspiracy Forum
Does Reddit seem like a good choice for this study?
(Score: 5, Funny) by Hartree on Tuesday April 03 2018, @05:46PM (7 children)
All the conspiracy theories are run out of a multibillion dollar datacenter at Area 51 co-funded by George Soros and the Koch brothers!
(Score: 1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 03 2018, @05:52PM (1 child)
You're forgetting that they are directed by the lizard people who have a pee-pee video of Soros doing it with an illegal alien in the basement of a pizza-place.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 03 2018, @06:00PM
The whole kiddie diddling thing is a cover story and distraction. The pizza place actually houses weather modification equipment. (Granted, the weather machines are based on lizard person technology that was reverse engineered at Area 51 after that horrific malfunction in 1947 that killed 3 good, hard-working lizard people.)
(Score: 2) by mendax on Tuesday April 03 2018, @06:56PM (4 children)
You forgot about the Jews and the Freemasons.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 2, Flamebait) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday April 03 2018, @07:41PM
Don't worry, J-Mo and/or VLM and/or Eth will show up any second now to accuse the Jews. And they'll mean it, too, because that's how nuts they are.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by Hartree on Tuesday April 03 2018, @07:51PM (2 children)
They're all fronts for The John Dillinger Died for You Society!
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Tuesday April 03 2018, @09:26PM (1 child)
Which is just another tool of the Invisible Hand Society.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 2) by Hartree on Tuesday April 03 2018, @09:56PM
But that's a misdirection too. It's The Mothers of Invention all the way down. (The Turtles just faked the lawsuit so they could join up with Frank Z and get out of the spotlight).