@inproceedings{marino-vieira-2026-population,
    title = "Population Replacement Conspiracy Theories Detection on Telegram and News Headlines: Benchmarking {LLM}s and {BERT} Models in {P}ortuguese and {I}talian",
    author = "Marino, Erik Bran  and
      Vieira, Renata",
    editor = "Frenda, Simona  and
      Stranisci, Marco Antonio  and
      Ashraf, Shaina  and
      Ren, Ada  and
      Konstas, Ioannis  and
      Naseem, Usman",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Information Disorder ({I}n{D}or) @ {LREC} 2026",
    month = may,
    year = "2026",
    address = "Palma de Mallorca, Spain",
    publisher = "ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA)",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/revision-workflow/2026.indor-1.11/",
    doi = "10.63317/4n7qd9ww7ete",
    pages = "104--113",
    ISBN = "978-2-493814-87-6",
    abstract = "Disinformation has become a serious threat to the democratic stability of Western societies, with various conspiracy theories spreading from fringe spaces to mainstream media and politics. While some of these theories may seem merely absurd and harmless, others pose significant risks. Among the most dangerous are Population Replacement Conspiracy Theories (PRCTs), which promote the false narrative of a deliberate demographic substitution through immigration. Despite their disinformative nature, increasing widespread and documented connections to extremist violence and political polarization, current computational detection models primarily target COVID-19 or general conspiracy theories, lacking specialized annotated corpora and approaches for identifying PRCTs in multilingual contexts. In this work, we present the first systematic benchmark for PRCT detection in Portuguese and Italian."
}