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LOCO : the 88-million-word language of conspiracy corpus
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Miani, A., Hills, Thomas Trenholm and Bangerter, A. (2022) LOCO : the 88-million-word language of conspiracy corpus. Behavioral Research Methods, 54 . pp. 1794-1817. doi:10.3758/s13428-021-01698-z ISSN 1554-351X.
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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-021-01698-z
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 meta-data 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., Lady 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 shared on Facebook. We also show 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/.
Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||||||
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Subjects: | H Social Sciences > HV Social pathology. Social and public welfare P Language and Literature > P Philology. Linguistics |
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Divisions: | Faculty of Science, Engineering and Medicine > Science > Psychology | ||||||||
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Conspiracy theories -- Psychological aspects , Psycholinguistics, Sociolinguistics -- Network analysis | ||||||||
Journal or Publication Title: | Behavioral Research Methods | ||||||||
Publisher: | Springer New York LLC | ||||||||
ISSN: | 1554-351X | ||||||||
Official Date: | August 2022 | ||||||||
Dates: |
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Volume: | 54 | ||||||||
Page Range: | pp. 1794-1817 | ||||||||
DOI: | 10.3758/s13428-021-01698-z | ||||||||
Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||||||
Publication Status: | Published | ||||||||
Access rights to Published version: | Open Access (Creative Commons) | ||||||||
Date of first compliant deposit: | 31 August 2021 | ||||||||
Date of first compliant Open Access: | 26 October 2021 | ||||||||
RIOXX Funder/Project Grant: |
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