# The Web Centipede: Understanding How Web Communities Influence Each Other Through the Lens of Mainstream and Alternative News Sources

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.06947 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.06947/

## Key facts

- Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 19 May 2017.

## Built on by (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Why So Toxic? Measuring and Triggering Toxic Behavior in Open-Domain Chatbots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03463/) (2022)
- ["Humans welcome to observe": A First Look at the Agent Social Network Moltbook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.10127/) (2026)
- [Spillover of Antisocial Behavior from Fringe Platforms: The Unintended Consequences of Community Banning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09803/) (2022)
- [The Spread of Propaganda by Coordinated Communities on Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.13046/) (2021)
- [On the rise of fear speech in online social media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10311/) (2023)
- [The Rise and Fall of Fake News sites: A Traffic Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.09258/) (2021)
- [Quantifying How Hateful Communities Radicalize Online Users](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.08697/) (2022)
- ["TL;DR:" Out-of-Context Adversarial Text Summarization and Hashtag Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00782/) (2021)
- [Leveraging Commonsense Knowledge on Classifying False News and Determining Checkworthiness of Claims](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03731/) (2021)
- [Human Brains Can't Detect Fake News: A Neuro-Cognitive Study of Textual Disinformation Susceptibility](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.08376/) (2022)
- [Linking Heterogeneous Data with Coordinated Agent Flows for Social Media Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.26172/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

As the number and the diversity of news outlets on the Web grow, so does the opportunity for "alternative" sources of information to emerge. Using large social networks like Twitter and Facebook, misleading, false, or agenda-driven information can quickly and seamlessly spread online, deceiving people or influencing their opinions. Also, the increased engagement of tightly knit communities, such as Reddit and 4chan, further compounds the problem, as their users initiate and propagate alternative information, not only within their own communities, but also to different ones as well as various social media. In fact, these platforms have become an important piece of the modern information ecosystem, which, thus far, has not been studied as a whole. In this paper, we begin to fill this gap by studying mainstream and alternative news shared on Twitter, Reddit, and 4chan. By analyzing millions of posts around several axes, we measure how mainstream and alternative news flows between these platforms. Our results indicate that alt-right communities within 4chan and Reddit can have a surprising level of influence on Twitter, providing evidence that "fringe" communities often succeed in spreading alternative news to mainstream social networks and the greater Web.