Shared Task

Conspiracy theories are complex narratives that attempt to explain the ultimate causes of significant events as cover plots orchestrated by secret, powerful, and malicious groups. A challenging aspect of identifying conspiracy with NLP models stems from the difficulty of distinguishing critical thinking from conspiratorial thinking in automatic content moderation. This distinction is vital because labeling a message as conspiratorial when it is only oppositional could drive those who were simply asking questions into the arms of the conspiracy communities.

At PAN 2024 we aim to analyse texts that reflect oppositional thinking and contain either conspiracy or critical narratives. The task will address two new challenges for the NLP research community: (1) to distinguish the conspiracy narrative from other oppositional narratives that do not express a conspiracy mentality (i.e., critical thinking); and (2) to identify in online messages the key elements of a narrative that fuels the intergroup conflict in oppositional thinking. To this end, we provide two text corpora, one English and one Spanish, and we propose two sub-tasks: Distinguishing between critical and conspiracy texts (subtask 1) and Detecting elements of the oppositional narratives (subtask 2). All the information about the task can be found here.