Users who participate in online communities linked to conspiracy theories show distinctive linguistic features even when discussing common topics such as cinema, music, cooking, or science. This emerges from research conducted by Francesco Corso and Francesco Pierri from the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering at Politecnico di Milano, together with Giuseppe Russo (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne) and Gianmarco De Francisci Morales (CENTAI Institute).
The study, based on the analysis of more than 500 million comments posted in over 20 Reddit communities, used psycholinguistic analysis tools and artificial intelligence models to assess whether it was possible to identify users active in the r/conspiracy community by observing their language in mainstream contexts.
The results show that these users display recognizable linguistic signals with an average accuracy of 87%, even years before their explicit participation in conspiracy communities. Among the most frequent signals are references to anger, anxiety, conflict, illness, and death, as well as more aggressive or emotionally charged language.
The findings suggest that there is no single conspiracy-related language that applies across the entire platform. Users adapt the way they express themselves to the norms of different online communities, making it necessary to design analysis and moderation tools that are more sensitive to context.
The research contributes to understanding the processes of radicalization and the spread of conspiracy narratives online, offering new perspectives for the development of monitoring and moderation tools capable of considering differences across digital communities.