The important bits of the abstract to me.

> how conspiracy theories ... and their factual counterpart conspiracies... We show how the Pizzagate framework relies on the conspiracy theorists’ interpretation of “hidden knowledge” to link otherwise unlinked domains of human interaction, and hypothesize that this multi-domain focus is an important feature of conspiracy theories. We contrast this to the single domain focus of an actual conspiracy. By highlighting the structural differences between the two narrative frameworks, our approach could be used by private and public analysts to help distinguish between conspiracy theories and conspiracies.

I'm not sure how to interpret this new classification of true conspiracies as just "conspiracies" and false ones as "conspiracy theories" that they seem to be pushing in this paper. Many things others called conspiracy theory were eventually proven to be true, at least in some degree, and those things are often still called conspiracy theories because they have uncomfortable truths that people would rather not acknowledge as factual. This seems like an abuse of terminology in some way to me.

Before I delve to deeply into this, I will first say, however; As an open conspiracy theorist, (doing my best to "take back" the phrase), who tries to stick to the facts as much as possible, I have long thought about how a scientific approach could be used to prove the likelyhood of what others call conspiracy theories, and the longer I have thought on the matter the more I have great hope that some researchers or other would stumble upon this likely-career hurting approach to said theories. While I disagree with the papers characterization of certain theories as true and certain ones as false, both due to the black and white label and the lack of context primarily surrounding the accusations of the narrative framework of the true to be one that is in more flux and single domain vs the one of the untrue being constantly in less flux and multi-domain, I think this approach could be modified and put to better use beyond the limitations of this paper itself, primarily because the root of their study is the same as a serious conspiracy theory researcher: "actants (people, places, things), relationships between actants, and a sequencing of these relationships".

It is only in the application of this approach to center on stories and social media that a series of methodological mistakes emerge to weaken the paper. I could go into some of the details if wanted about these weaknesses, but in general on HN I try to keep the discussion more meta on the topic of conspiracy theories in order to not devolve the conversation too much. One example I will give however, is their overreliance on certain sources of data (twitter, reddit) that were considered at best secondary to the more deep and open conversations (the chans, irc, etc) being had on certain topics (pizzagate for example) juxtaposed against the reliance on UCLA aggregates of NJ newspapers on the topic of Bridgegate. I know, I was participating in all of the above when the last post which "broke the last straw" on reddit caused the sub to be banned. [1] Again, I don't say this to start a discussion on pizzagate as it is likely to devolve quickly, but rather to show I'm not making up my accusations of methodological weakness based on nothing. This sort of snowball methodological weakness then undermines their conclusion, which quickly goes off the rails into so many tropes and cliches not backed by their data and research it quite surprises me to see the the authors take a semi-defensible approach and allow it to be deteriorated by such a series of erroneous "conclusions". Go read the conclusion section for yourself if you think I am exaggerating.

1. https://archive.md/MrsGu

edit: in particular I would like to call out their overreliance on calling conspiracy theory discussion some variation of "imaginative interpretations of “hidden knowledge”". In reality, and this is something I frequently like to stress to my more logical/scientific friends who are skeptical of certain conspiracy theories, what many conspiracy theories rely on, often without being aware of it (to their detriment) is a series of inductive logical conclusions, as opposed to a series of deductive logical conclusions. Rightly so I say, because in the domain of conspiracy theory you often lack the hard evidence to back claims, and therefor must often rely on inductive logic instead (and the lack of deductive evidence does not alway indicate untruthfulness as is often assumed). This is one of the keys that helped me get past many issues, because when it comes to conspiracy theories true or not, the real crux is the probabalistic likelyhood of truth which can be modified as more data points emerge, not some black and white true and untrue label.