# A Golden Age: Conspiracy Theories' Relationship with Misinformation Outlets, News Media, and the Wider Internet

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.10880 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.10880/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 26 Jan 2023.

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Machine-Made Media: Monitoring the Mobilization of Machine-Generated Articles on Misinformation and Mainstream News Websites](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.09820/) (2023)
- [Specious Sites: Tracking the Spread and Sway of Spurious News Stories at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02068/) (2023)
- [Sword and Shield: Uses and Strategies of LLMs in Navigating Disinformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07211/) (2025)
- [Tracking the Takes and Trajectories of English-Language News Narratives across Trustworthy and Worrisome Websites](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.09102/) (2025)
- [UPB @ ACTI: Detecting Conspiracies using fine tuned Sentence Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16275/) (2023)
- [CrediBench: Building Web-Scale Network Datasets for Information Integrity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23340/) (2025)
- [Measuring the Semantic Structure and Evolution of Conspiracy Theories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.26062/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Do we live in a "Golden Age of Conspiracy Theories?" In the last few decades, conspiracy theories have proliferated on the Internet with some having dangerous real-world consequences. A large contingent of those who participated in the January 6th attack on the US Capitol fervently believed in the QAnon conspiracy theory. In this work, we study the relationships amongst five prominent conspiracy theories (QAnon, COVID, UFO/Aliens, 9/11, and Flat-Earth) and each of their respective relationships to the news media, both authentic news and misinformation. Identifying and publishing a set of 755 different conspiracy theory websites dedicated to our five conspiracy theories, we find that each set often hyperlinks to the same external domains, with COVID and QAnon conspiracy theory websites having the largest amount of shared connections. Examining the role of news media, we further find that not only do outlets known for spreading misinformation hyperlink to our set of conspiracy theory websites more often than authentic news websites but also that this hyperlinking increased dramatically between 2018 and 2021, with the advent of QAnon and the start of COVID-19 pandemic. Using partial Granger-causality, we uncover several positive correlative relationships between the hyperlinks from misinformation websites and the popularity of conspiracy theory websites, suggesting the prominent role that misinformation news outlets play in popularizing many conspiracy theories.