Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
conspiracy theories
semantic change
lexical stability
online discourse
semantic evolution
I Want to Believe (but the Vocabulary Changed): Measuring the Semantic Structure and Evolution of Conspiracy Theories
🤖 AI Summary
This study addresses a critical limitation in existing research by moving beyond the treatment of conspiracy theories as static keywords, instead modeling them as dynamic semantic entities whose meanings evolve over time. Leveraging 169.9 million comments from Reddit’s political subreddits spanning 2012 to 2022, the authors employ aligned word embeddings and cross-temporal semantic neighborhood comparisons to trace the non-uniform evolutionary trajectories of conspiracy-related language in semantic space—characterized by patterns of stability, expansion, contraction, and replacement. The findings reveal that conspiracy theories occupy coherent and distinguishable regions within the semantic landscape, exhibiting complex temporal dynamics that far exceed the explanatory capacity of conventional keyword-based analyses, thereby overcoming key methodological constraints in prior work.
📝 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.
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
semantic evolution
conspiracy theories
aligned word embeddings
semantic structure
online political discourse
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