ACTI at EVALITA 2023: Overview of the Conspiracy Theory Identification Task

Automatic Conspiracy Theory Identification (ACTI) is a new shared task proposed for the first time at the EVALITA 2023 evaluation campaign. ACTI is based on a new, manually labeled dataset of comments scraped from conspiratorial Telegram channels and consists of two subtasks: (1) identifying conspiratorial content (conspiratorial content classification); and (2) classifying content into specific conspiracy theories (conspiratorial category classification). A total of 15 teams participated in the task with 81 submissions. In this task summary, we discuss the data and task, and outline the bestperforming approaches that are largely based on large language models. We conclude with a brief discussion of the application of large language models to counter the spread of misinformation on online platforms.