Related papers: On the Globalization of the QAnon Conspiracy Theor…
Conspiracy theories involving the New World Order (NWO), Globalism, and QAnon have become central to discussions on Brazilian Telegram, especially during global crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, this study aims to address the…
QAnon refers to a set of far-right, conspiratorial ideologies that have risen in popularity in the U.S. since their initial promotion in 2017 on the 4chan internet message board. A central narrative element of QAnon is that a powerful group…
Social media provide a fertile ground where conspiracy theories and radical ideas can flourish, reach broad audiences, and sometimes lead to hate or violence beyond the online world itself. QAnon represents a notable example of a political…
Conspiracy theories have long drawn public attention, but their explosive growth on platforms like Telegram during the COVID-19 pandemic raises pressing questions about their impact on societal trust, democracy, and public health. We…
The QAnon conspiracy posits that Satan-worshiping Democrats operate a covert child sex-trafficking operation, which Donald Trump is destined to expose and annihilate. Emblematic of the ease with which political misconceptions can spread…
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…
There has been concern about the proliferation of the "QAnon" conspiracy theory on Facebook, but little is known about how its misleading narrative propagated on the world's largest social media platform. Thus, the present research analyzed…
Online fringe communities offer fertile grounds for users seeking and sharing ideas fueling suspicion of mainstream news and conspiracy theories. Among these, the QAnon conspiracy theory emerged in 2017 on 4chan, broadly supporting the idea…
QAnon is an umbrella conspiracy theory that encompasses a wide spectrum of people. The COVID-19 pandemic has helped raise the QAnon conspiracy theory to a wide-spreading movement, especially in the US. Here, we study users' dynamics on…
Online communities of known extremist groups like the alt-right and QAnon have been well explored in past work. However, we find that an extremist group called Sovereign Citizens is relatively unexplored despite its existence since the…
QAnon is a far-right conspiracy theory whose followers largely organize online. In this work, we use web crawls seeded from two of the largest QAnon hotbeds on the Internet, Voat and 8kun, to build a QAnon-centered domain-based hyperlink…
Widespread conspiracy theories may significantly impact our society. This paper focuses on the QAnon conspiracy theory, a consequential conspiracy theory that started on and disseminated successfully through social media. Our work…
The social media platform "Parler" has emerged into a prominent fringe community where a significant part of the user base are self-reported supporters of QAnon, a far-right conspiracy theory alleging that a cabal of elites controls global…
Do we live in a "Golden Age of Conspiracy Theories?" In the last few decades, conspiracy theories have proliferated on the Internet with some having dangerous real-world consequences. A large contingent of those who participated in the…
As radical messaging has proliferated on social networking sites, platforms like Reddit have been used to host support groups, including support communities for the families and friends of radicalized individuals. This study examines the…
Online communities are groups of people who interact primarily via the Internet, often sharing common interests. Some of these groups, particularly supporters of Q who created the far-right conspiracy theory known as QAnon, are highly toxic…
The automated detection of conspiracy theories online typically relies on supervised learning. However, creating respective training data requires expertise, time and mental resilience, given the often harmful content. Moreover, available…
To address the increasing prevalence of (audio-)visual data on social media, and to capture the evolving and dynamic nature of this communication, researchers have begun to explore the potential of unsupervised approaches for analyzing…
Parler, a "free speech" platform popular with conservatives, was taken offline in January 2021 due to the lack of moderation of hateful and QAnon- and other conspiracy-related content that allegedly made it instrumental in the organisation…
Conspiracy theories, particularly those focused on anti-vaccine narratives and the promotion of off-label medications such as MMS and CDS, have proliferated on Telegram, including in Brazil, finding fertile ground among communities that…