Peeking into conspiracy theory conversations with a research bot

Are you ever curious about some online subculture, niche discussion, or even conspiracy theory—but don’t feel like reading through endless social media threads to get to know it? In this blog post, we explore how a Dcipher Research Bot can be used to learn about one of the more eccentric conversations out there: the debate about whether the Earth is actually flat.

To dip our feet into the contemporary and somewhat outlandish discussions about the shape of the Earth, we asked a Dcipher Research Bot to read all posts on X (formerly known as Twitter) from the last 30 days that include one of the phrases “flat Earth” and “Earth is flat”. As we might expect, this made the bot pick up posts by flat-Earth believers themselves as well as by people talking about them or arguing against them.

After a short wait, our bot was ready to answer our questions about what it had learned. We started with the basics, by asking the bot for arguments it has seen people share in favor of the flat Earth theory:

The first argument—that “observable facts” would support the theory—is too vague to tell us much, but may echo similar vague statements that our bot has seen in the X posts. We also got two more intriguing claims, though: that something about lunar eclipses and the oceans could have something to say in favor of the flat Earth theory. When a Dcipher Research Bot shows us something that catches our attention in this way, it is time to ask a follow-up question:

We can also throw guesses at our bot. Are there religious references in the discussions, for example, perhaps to the Bible? We asked the bot:

We could have kept asking the bot for details about the arguments, but instead turned our attention to the believers themselves; did our research bot, based on the posts that it had read, think that people who argue that the Earth is flat are really serious about it?

OK, so at least some people seem to genuinely believe that the Earth is flat. Did our bot also pick up anything about the other side of the discussion based on their posts? What do they think about the flat Earth believers? As we can see below, our Dcipher Research Bot was able to give a rather nuanced summary of the range of attitudes toward the believers that other people demonstrate:

Finally, there can be no conspiracy theory without some idea about a conspiracy, right? Who do people holding the idea that the Earth is flat believe is conspiring to make the rest of us think that it is round?

That’s as far as we wanted to go to get a glimpse of the conversations about whether the Earth is flat. Are there any peculiar discussions you know exist and would like to get a quick idea about? Sign up for a Dcipher account today, get $50 free credits, and train your own Dcipher Research Bot today! And just to make something clear: Dcipher Research Bots can of course also be used to study more mainstream online discussions.