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I Want to Believe (but the Vocabulary Changed): Measuring the Semantic Structure and Evolution of Conspiracy Theories
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I Want to Believe (but the Vocabulary Changed): Measuring the Semantic Structure and Evolution of Conspiracy Theories

Manisha Keim, Sarmad Chandio, Osama Khalid and Rishab Nithyanand
ArXiv.org
Cornell University
03/27/2026
DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2603.26062
url
https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2603.26062View
Preprint (Author's original) This preprint has not been evaluated by subject experts through peer review. Preprints may undergo extensive changes and/or become peer-reviewed journal articles. Open Access

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.
 Computer Science - Computation and Language Computer Science - Computers and Society Computer Science - Social and Information Networks

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