Analyzing the Traits and Anomalies of Political Discussions on Reddit

Abstract

Online communities like Reddit feature intensive discussions on political topics, engaging many users who give and receive votes for their posts and comments. Prior work has focused on detecting controversial discussions and analyzing the role of troll-like users. This paper provides a systematic analysis of the characteristics of user actions, like replies and votes, in discussion threads, identifying different patterns that refine the notion of controversies into disputes, disruptions and discrepancies. Most importantly, our study connects the dimension of user actions with a rich feature space comprising also the sentiments expressed in post contents and the topical variation across the posts and replies. We use this framework to gain insight on the traits of different archetypes of discussions, and to statistically test a variety of hypotheses on expected and abnormal behavior.

The Reddit Politosphere: A Large-Scale Text and Network Resource of Online Political Discourse

“…Studies have investigated a wide range of phenomena including political polarization (Adamic and Glance 2005;Conover et al 2011;Himelboim, McCreery, and Smith 2013;Weber, Garimella, and Batayneh 2013;Garcia et al 2015;Garimella et al 2018;Morales et al 2019), ideological radicalization (Grover and Mark 2019;Crawford, Keen, and Suarez-Tangil 2021;Mamié, Ribeiro, and West 2021), and political framing (Demszky et al 2019;Mendelsohn, Budak, and Jurgens 2021;Reiter-Haas, Kopeinik, and Lex 2021). Since many subreddits are political discussion groups (e.g., r/politics), sometimes even with explicit ideological orientation (e.g., r/Conservative, r/Liberal), Reddit has become a particularly popular resource for studies on online political discourse (Nithyanand, Schaffner, and Gill 2017;An et al 2019;Grover and Mark 2019;Guimaraes et al 2019;Soliman, Hafer, and Lemmerich 2019;Marchal 2020;Rajadesingan, Resnick, and Budak 2020;Waller and Anderson 2021). However, most previous work analyzing political discourse on Reddit has relied on a small number of hand-picked subreddits or external lists of political subreddits, which provides an only incomplete picture of Reddit's multifaceted political landscape.…”

“…Identifying subreddits that meet these criteria is a pivotal step for the dataset since it determines its coverage; e.g., if we systematically miss subreddits of certain political ideologies, the Reddit Politosphere might misrepresent the space of political discourse on Reddit. Prior studies have typically relied on manually identified political subreddits (An et al 2019;Grover and Mark 2019;Guimaraes et al 2019;Soliman, Hafer, and Lemmerich 2019;Marchal 2020) or drawn on a list 2 of political subreddits on r/politics (Nithyanand, Schaffner, and Gill 2017). While the first method does not scale to a larger number of subreddits, the second method has the disadvantage of staleness (e.g., the list on r/politics is no longer maintained and does not contain any recentlycreated subreddits).…”

“…The computational analysis of political discourse has attracted growing interest over the last few years (Garimella et al 2018;Johnson and Goldwasser 2018;An et al 2019;Demszky et al 2019;Grover and Mark 2019;Guimaraes et al 2019;Soliman, Hafer, and Lemmerich 2019;Davoodi, Waltenburg, and Goldwasser 2020;Jiang et al 2020;Marchal 2020;Mokhberian et al 2020;Rajadesingan, Resnick, and Budak 2020;He et al 2021;Mendelsohn, Budak, and Jurgens 2021;Waller and Anderson 2021), a trend spurred both by the availability of suitable data from social media and by the development of increasingly refined methodological tools. Despite this progress, a comprehensive and easily-accessible resource for research into the online political landscape has so far been missing, resulting in studies mostly based on ad-hoc collected datasets (e.g., tweets crawled for a specific paper).…”

X-Posts Explained: Analyzing and Predicting Controversial Contributions in Thematically Diverse Reddit Forums

“…Work on understanding polarization in social media has mostly looked into limited kinds of sources like Twitter and Wikipedia (edit history and talk pages). There is little work on more elaborate discussion forums, like Quora or Reddit, exceptions being (Wang et al 2013;Peddinti et al 2014;Guimarães et al 2019;Grover and Mark 2019;Chang and Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil 2019;Jhaver et al 2019) where Copyright c 2021, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved.…”

“…Specifically, we build on the notion of X-posts introduced by (Guimarães et al 2019). These are posts that have attracted negative community feedback, despite not being necessarily associated with trolling.…”