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posted by fyngyrz on Tuesday April 03 2018, @05:29PM   Printer-friendly
from the horde-it-on-the-grapevine dept.

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?


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  • (Score: 2) by Hartree on Tuesday April 03 2018, @09:56PM

    by Hartree (195) on Tuesday April 03 2018, @09:56PM (#662194)

    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).

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