Image from TheGuardian article
Why people believe Covid conspiracy theories: could folklore hold the answer?
Professor Roychowdhury’s recent paper was featured in an article on TheGuardian, PDF
The original paper is available at here | PDF.
Researchers have mapped the web of connections underpinning coronavirus conspiracy theories, opening a new way of understanding and challenging them.
Using Danish witchcraft folklore as a model, the researchers from UCLA and Berkeley analysed thousands of social media posts with an artificial intelligence tool and extracted the key people, things and relationships.
The tool enabled them to piece together the underlying stories in coronavirus conspiracy theories from fragments in online posts. The model that allows for narratives to be reconstructed from the noisy data of online updates, was designed by Prof Vwani Roychowdhury, who initiated the project, and was built by his team in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at UCLA.
AI Separates Conspiracy Theory From Conspiracy Fact
An interview with Professor Roychowdhury on Spectrum TV.
…Conspiracy theories no longer orbit amongst the "fringe elements" in society. They have spun into the center of social discourse. They are how tens of millions of people explain world events or rationalize their behavior. Conspiracy theories threaten to undermine democratic elections or may put an entire population at great risk because one theory or another explains why one shouldn't wear a mask or get a vaccine.
How did we get here?
That's the question UCLA Professor Vwani Roychowdhury asked. He is a computer engineer who, along with his colleagues and doctoral students, are studying conspiracy "theory" by looking at conspiracy "fact" — how false narratives come to life, spread, and, then, create potential harm…
Conspiracy in the time of corona: automatic detection of emerging COVID-19 conspiracy theories in social media and the news.
FastCompany | PDF
…The automated approach can detect the telltale signs of a baseless conspiracy theory as it begins to turn into a narrative on social media..
TechXplore | PDF
DJG Blogger | PDF
An AI tool can distinguish between a conspiracy theory and a true conspiracy – it comes down to how easily the story falls apart
An automated pipeline for the discovery of conspiracy and conspiracy theory narrative frameworks: Bridgegate, Pizzagate and storytelling on the web
…offers a new way to understand how unfounded conspiracy theories emerge online. The research, which combines sophisticated artificial intelligence and a deep knowledge of how folklore is structured, explains how unrelated facts and false information can connect into a narrative framework that would quickly fall apart if some of those elements are taken out of the mix…
..Researchers produced a graphic representation of the narratives they analyzed, with layers for major subplots of each story, and lines connecting the key people, places and institutions within and among those layers..