LOCO: The 88-million-word language of conspiracy corpus

Abstract

The spread of online conspiracy theories represents a serious threat to society. To understand the content of conspiracies, here we present the language of conspiracy (LOCO) corpus. LOCO is an 88-million-token corpus composed of topic-matched conspiracy (N = 23,937) and mainstream (N = 72,806) documents harvested from 150 websites. Mimicking internet user behavior, documents were identified using Google by crossing a set of seed phrases with a set of websites. LOCO is hierarchically structured, meaning that each document is cross-nested within websites (N = 150) and topics (N = 600, on three different resolutions). A rich set of linguistic features (N = 287) and metadata includes upload date, measures of social media engagement, measures of website popularity, size, and traffic, as well as political bias and factual reporting annotations. We explored LOCO’s features from different perspectives showing that documents track important societal events through time (e.g., Princess Diana’s death, Sandy Hook school shooting, coronavirus outbreaks), while patterns of lexical features (e.g., deception, power, dominance) overlap with those extracted from online social media communities dedicated to conspiracy theories. By computing within-subcorpus cosine similarity, we derived a subset of the most representative conspiracy documents (N = 4,227), which, compared to other conspiracy documents, display prototypical and exaggerated conspiratorial language and are more frequently shared on Facebook. We also show that conspiracy website users navigate to websites via more direct means than mainstream users, suggesting confirmation bias. LOCO and related datasets are freely available at https://osf.io/snpcg/.

Interconnectedness and (in)coherence as a signature of conspiracy worldviews

“…For example, because worldviews are essential for making sense of the world, disconfirming a worldview would affect the very sense of an individual’s reality ( 45 ). To avoid this, people enable defensive mechanisms such as confirmation bias ( 28 , 46 ) that allows them to preserve a worldview by seeking confirmation while avoiding challenges. Similar mechanisms could be used to protect any type of worldview.…”

“…In our sample, the reverse is true, and we stress that this phenomenon is evidence for top-down thematic coercion, where themes fit an overarching conspiracy worldview. In this way, each theme is translated into a conspiracy by adding a set of recurrent lexical patterns involving language of deception, questioning, social identification, and negative emotions ( 28 ). These lexical patterns can be reused in any conspiratorial context and are shared across conspiracy narratives ( 28 ).…”

“…In this way, each theme is translated into a conspiracy by adding a set of recurrent lexical patterns involving language of deception, questioning, social identification, and negative emotions ( 28 ). These lexical patterns can be reused in any conspiratorial context and are shared across conspiracy narratives ( 28 ).…”

“…Before topic extraction, texts were preprocessed: Texts were converted to American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) characters; lower cased; cleaned by Uniform Resource Locators (URLs), punctuation, numbers, symbols, separators, and stop words [for the full list, see SM5 in the supplementary materials of ( 28 )]; and stemmed. We then generated a document term matrix, from which we extracted only the most frequent 10,000 words.…”

“…Our analyses rely on the largest corpus of CTs available today, language of conspiracy (LOCO) ( 28 ), an 88 million–word corpus composed of topic-matched conspiracy ( N = 23,937) and nonconspiracy ( N = 72,806) text documents (i.e., webpages) harvested from 150 websites. LOCO provides two types of semantic indexes for each document.…”