United States

QAnon is a far-right conspiracy theory whose followers largely organize online. In this work, we seek to identify, understand, and learn from the websites that spread QAnon content online. Using website crawling seeded from two of the largest QAnon hotbeds on the Internet, Voat and 8kun, and the resulting hyperlink graph, we curate the largest list of QAnon centered websites to date. From this list of 324 QAnon focused sites, we document the different types of QAnon-focused domains, their domain hosting, and their popularity. We show QAnon websites&#39; connection to mainstream news and misinformation websites, highlighting the outsized role misinformation websites play in spreading the conspiracy. We finally leverage our hyperlink graph and build a random forest classifier to distinguish between misinformation and authentic news sites, achieving 0.98 AUC on a test set. Our results demonstrate new and effective ways to study conspiracy and misinformation on the Internet.

ICWSM 2022

No Calm in The Storm: Investigating QAnon Website Relationships

qanon

web crawling

misinformation

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QAnon is a far-right conspiracy theory whose followers largely organize online. In this work, we seek to identify, understand, and learn from the websites that spread QAnon content online. Using website crawling seeded from two of the largest QAnon hotbeds on the Internet, Voat and 8kun, and the resulting hyperlink graph, we curate the largest list of QAnon centered websites to date. From this list of 324 QAnon focused sites, we document the different types of QAnon-focused domains, their domain hosting, and their popularity. We show QAnon websites' connection to mainstream news and misinformation websites, highlighting the outsized role misinformation websites play in spreading the conspiracy. We finally leverage our hyperlink graph and build a random forest classifier to distinguish between misinformation and authentic news sites, achieving 0.98 AUC on a test set. Our results demonstrate new and effective ways to study conspiracy and misinformation on the Internet.

technical paper

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The International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM) is a forum for researchers from multiple disciplines to come together to share knowledge, discuss ideas, exchange information, and learn about cutting-edge research in diverse fields with the common theme of online social media. This overall theme includes research in new perspectives in social theories, as well as computational algorithms for analyzing social media. ICWSM is a singularly fitting venue for research that blends social science and computational approaches to answer important and challenging questions about human social behavior through social media while advancing computational tools for vast and unstructured data.

The QAnon conspiracy theory claims that a cabal of (literally) blood-thirsty politicians and media personalities are engaged in a war to destroy society. By interpreting cryptic “drops” of information from an anonymous insider calling themself Q, adherents of the conspiracy theory believe that Donald Trump is leading them in an active fight against this cabal. QAnon has been covered extensively by the media, as its adherents have been involved in multiple violent acts, including the January 6th, 2021 seditious storming of the US Capitol building. Nevertheless, we still have relatively little understanding of how the theory evolved and spread on the Web, and the role played in that by multiple platforms.

To address this gap, we study QAnon from the perspective of “Q” themself. We build a dataset of 4,949 canonical Q drops collected from six “aggregation sites,” which curate
and archive them from their original posting to anonymous and ephemeral image boards. We expose that these sites have a relatively low (overall) agreement, and thus at least some Q drops should probably be considered apocryphal. We then analyze the Q drops’ contents to identify topics of discussion and find statistically significant indications that drops were not authored by a single individual. Finally, we look at how posts on Reddit are used to disseminate Q drops to wider audiences. We find that dissemination was (initially) limited to a few sub-communities and that, while heavy-handed moderation decisions have reduced the overall issue, the “gospel” of Q persists on the Web.

The Gospel According to Q: Understanding the QAnon Conspiracy from the Perspective of Canonical Information

Identifying and characterizing disinformation in political discourse on social media is critical to ensure the integrity of elections and democratic processes around the world. Persistent manipulation of social media has resulted in increased concerns regarding the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election, due to its potential to influence individual opinions and social dynamics. In this work, we focus on the identification of distorted facts, in the form of unreliable and conspiratorial narratives in election-related tweets, to characterize discourse manipulation prior to the election. We apply a detection model to separate factual from unreliable (or conspiratorial) claims analyzing a dataset of 242 million election-related tweets. The identified claims are used to investigate targeted topics of disinformation, and conspiracy groups, most notably the far-right QAnon conspiracy group. Further, we characterize account engagements with unreliable and conspiracy tweets, and with the QAnon conspiracy group, by political leaning and tweet types. Finally, using a regression discontinuity design, we investigate whether Twitter's actions to curb QAnon activity on the platform were effective, and how QAnon accounts adapt to Twitter's restrictions.

Characterizing Online Engagement with Disinformation and Conspiracies in the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election

The disruptive offline mobilization of participants in online conspiracy theory (CT) discussions has highlighted the importance of understanding how online users may form radicalized conspiracy beliefs. While prior work researched the factors leading up to joining online CT discussions and provided theories of how conspiracy beliefs form, we have little understanding of how conspiracy radicalization evolves after users join CT discussion communities.
In this paper, we provide the empirical modeling of various radicalization phases in online CT discussion participants.
To unpack how conspiracy engagement is related to radicalization, we first characterize the users' journey through CT discussions via conspiracy engagement pathways.
Specifically, by studying 36K Reddit users through their 169M contributions, we uncover four distinct pathways of conspiracy engagement: steady high, increasing, decreasing, and steady low.
We further model three successive stages of radicalization guided by prior theoretical works.
Specific sub-populations of users, namely those on steady high and increasing conspiracy engagement pathways, progress successively through various radicalization stages. In contrast, users on the decreasing engagement pathway show distinct behavior: they limit their CT discussions to specialized topics, participate in diverse discussion groups, and show reduced conformity with conspiracy subreddits.
By examining users who disengage from online CT discussions, this paper provides promising insights about conspiracy recovery process.

Pathways through Conspiracy: The Evolution of Conspiracy Radicalization through Engagement in Online Conspiracy Discussions

Several factors influence the popularity of content on social media, including the what, when, and who of a post. Of these factors, the what and when of content are easiest to customize in order to maximize viewership and reach. Further, the title of a post (part of the what) is the easiest to tailor, compared to the post's body, which is often fixed. So, in this paper, we assess the impact of a post's title on its popularity while controlling for the time of posting (the when) by proposing an interpretable attention-based model. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on predicting the popularity of posts on multiple online communities of various sizes, topics, and formats while still being parsimonious. Interpretation of our model's attention weights sheds light on the heterogeneous patterns in how the specific words in a post's title shape its popularity across different communities. Our results highlight the power of sentiment alignment, personal storytelling, and even personality politics in propelling content to virality.

Judging a book by its cover: Predicting the marginal impact of Title on relative post popularity in Social Media

Platforms often host multiple online groups with overlapping topics and members. How can researchers and designers understand how related groups affect each other? Inspired by population ecology,  prior  research  in  social  computing  and human-computer  interaction  has  studied  related  groups  by correlating group size with degrees of overlap in content and membership, but has produced puzzling results: overlap is associated with competition in some contexts but with mutual-ism in others. We suggest that this inconsistency results from aggregating intergroup relationships into an overall environmental effect that obscures the diversity of competition and mutualism among related groups. Drawing on the framework of community ecology, we introduce a time-series method for inferring competition and mutualism. We then use this frame-work to inform a large-scale analysis of clusters of subreddits that all have high user overlap. We find that mutualism is more common than competition.

Identifying Competition and Mutualism Between Online Groups

Prevalent on modern social media, both hashtags and emojis are text elements that function beyond plain text. While hashtags utilize free-formed strings and are highlighted by the platform, emojis are bonded by Unicode Standard and rendered by the platforms. Yet both have been used to mark discussion topics, express sentiment, show identity, and highlight keywords. This paper takes the initiative to analyze and highlight the strong association between hashtags and emojis, not only in their usage frequency, but also in their semantics. We show that the association is strong enough for improving downstream tasks. To this end, we design a representation learning model that can learn emoji-based representations to improve hashtag prediction.

#Emoji: A Study on the Association between Emojis and Hashtags on Twitter

During the COVID-19 pandemic, local news organizations have played an integral role in keeping communities informed about the spread and impact of the virus. We explore how political, social media, and economic factors impacted the way local media have reported on COVID-19 developments at a national scale. We construct and make available a dataset of over 10,000 local news organizations across the U.S. and their social media handles. We use social media data to model the population reach of outlets, and the underlying content relationships between them. Building on this data, we analyze how local and national media covered four key COVID-19 news topics: Statistics and Case Counts, Vaccines and Testing, Public Health Guidelines, and Economic Effects. Our results show that news outlets with higher population reach have reported proportionally more on COVID-19 than more local outlets. When broken out by topic, we observe that the Statistics and Case Counts topic is covered proportionally more by outlets that have a lower population reach and are in more Republican-leaning areas, an effect which is re- versed for the Economic Effects topic. Our analysis further shows that while social media audiences generally engage less with outlets with a smaller population reach, they tend to engage more with these outlets on posts about COVID-19. People also use relatively more emotive reactions on the posts of low population reach outlets. Finally, we demonstrate that COVID-19 posts in Republican-leaning counties generally receive more comments and fewer likes than in Democratic counties.

Understanding Local News Social Coverage and Engagement at Scale During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Users often post on content-sharing platforms in the hope of attracting high engagement from viewers. Some posts receive unusual attention and go "viral", eliciting a significant response (likes, views, shares) to the creator in the form of popularity shocks. Past theories have suggested a sense of reputation as one of the key drivers of online activity and the tendency of users to repeat fruitful behaviors. Based on these, we theorize popularity shocks to be linked with changes in the behavior of users. In this paper, we propose a framework to study the changes in user activity in terms of frequency of posting and content posted around popularity shocks. Further, given the sudden nature of their occurrence, we look into the survival durations of effects associated with these shocks. We observe that popularity shocks lead to an increase in the posting frequency of users, and users alter their content to match with the one which resulted in the shock. Also, it is found that shocks are tough to maintain, with effects fading within a few days for most users. High response from viewers and diversification of content posted is found to be linked with longer survival durations of the shock effects. We believe our work fills the gap related to observing users' online behavior exposed to sudden popularity and has widespread implications for platforms, users, and brands involved in marketing on such platforms.

Effect of Popularity Shocks on User Behaviour

The outbreak of COVID‐19 had a huge global impact, and non-scientific beliefs and political polarization have significantly influenced the population's behavior. In this context, COVID vaccines were made available in an unprecedented time, but a high level of hesitance has been observed that can undermine community immunization. Traditionally, anti-vaccination attitudes are more related to conspiratorial thinking rather than political bias. In Brazil, a country with an exemplar tradition in large-scale vaccination programs, all COVID-related topics have also been discussed under a strong political bias. In this paper, we use a multi-dimensional analysis framework to understand if anti/pro-vaccination stances expressed by Brazilians in social media are influenced by political polarization. The analysis framework incorporates: techniques to automatically infer from users their political orientation, topic modeling to discover their concerns, network analysis to characterize their social behavior, and the characterization of information sources and external influence. Our main findings confirm that anti/pro stances are biased by political polarization, right and left, respectively. While a significant proportion of pro-vaxxers display haste for an immunization program and criticize the government's actions, the anti-vaxxers distrust a vaccine developed in a record time. Anti-vaccination stance is also related to prejudice against China (anti-sinovaxxers), revealing conspiratorial theories related to communism. All groups display an ``echo chamber" behavior, revealing they are not open to distinct views.

Analysis of the influence of political polarization in the vaccination stance: the Brazilian COVID-19 scenario

While billions of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered, too many people remain hesitant. Twitter, with its substantial reach and daily exposure, is an excellent resource for examining how people frame their vaccine hesitancy and to uncover vaccine hesitancy profiles. In this paper we expose our processing journey from identifying Vaccine Hesitancy Framings in a collection of 9,133,471 original tweets discussing the COVID-19 vaccines, establishing their ontological commitments, annotating the Moral Foundations they imply to the automatic recognition of the stance of the tweet authors toward any of the CoVaxFrames that we have identified. When we found that 805,336 Twitter users had a stance towards some CoVaxFrames in either the 9,133,471 original tweets or their 17,346,664 retweets, we were able to derive nine different Vaccine Hesitancy Profiles of these users and to interpret these profiles based on the ontological commitments of the frames they evoked in their tweets and on value of their stance towards the evoked frames.

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The Gospel According to Q: Understanding the QAnon Conspiracy from the Perspective of Canonical Information

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Rise of QAnon: A Mental Model of Good and Evil Stews in an Echochamber

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Next from ICWSM 2022

The Gospel According to Q: Understanding the QAnon Conspiracy from the Perspective of Canonical Information

Similar lecture

Rise of QAnon: A Mental Model of Good and Evil Stews in an Echochamber

Downloads