Related papers: Who could be behind QAnon? Authorship attribution …
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Online discussion platforms offer a forum to strengthen and propagate belief in misinformed conspiracy theories. Yet, they also offer avenues for conspiracy theorists to express their doubts and experiences of cognitive dissonance. Such…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
False information detection on social media is challenging as it commonly requires tedious evidence-collecting but lacks available comparative information. Clues mined from user comments, as the wisdom of crowds, could be of considerable…
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…
In recent years, radicalization is being increasingly attempted on video-sharing platforms. Previous studies have been proposed to identify online radicalization using generic social context analysis, without taking into account…
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…
QAnon is a far-right conspiracy theory that became popular and mainstream over the past few years. Worryingly, the QAnon conspiracy theory has implications in the real world, with supporters of the theory participating in real-world violent…
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…
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…
Authorship verification is the task of analyzing the linguistic patterns of two or more texts to determine whether they were written by the same author or not. The analysis is traditionally performed by experts who consider linguistic…