The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Calvin Yixiang Cheng, whose focus is on conspiracy theories on social media. These often persist for a very long time, and in their diffusion change their linguistic forms. Such content change may in fact aid in their persistence.
This study examines such language mutation. It works with Twitter data from 2020-22, collecting tweets which match keywords from major fact-checking sources to identify relevant conspiracist posts, and clustered those posts based on the fact-checking information that debunks them. It also identified the shortest possible paths between these claim clusters to explore their most likely connections with other claims.
For each cluster, the posts included could then be examined over time to identify the change in their linguistic properties. There was a strong correlation between semantic drift and survivability of claims: high drift produces greater longevity. Actor, action, and target changes in the rhetoric tend to produce greater lifespans for conspiracy theories.
