Communities, Gateways, and Bridges: Measuring Attention Flow in the Reddit Political Sphere

Rollo, Cesare; Morales, Gianmarco De Francisci; Monti, Corrado; Panisson, André

doi:10.1007/978-3-031-19097-1_1

Cited by 6 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 36 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Future work includes finding more precise NLP tools to better characterize the behavioral consequences of opinion change, and investigating which users that display more prominent changes in behavior. This matter has also practical consequences for fighting against misinformation (e.g., on health-related issues) where opinion change, as part of a polarization process, can make users more exposed to hoaxes (Rollo et al 2022). Therefore, it would be helpful to verify our findings in other media and societies.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 80%

“…However, this effect disappears when debating socio-moral topics, despite the fact that factual evidence is provided more often in debates about these topics. Finally, Monti et al (2022) analyze the social dimensions of language on CMV, and find that messages expressing the pragmatics social dimensions of knowledge, similarity, and trust, are most likely to lead to opinion change.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We follow the definition of sociopolitical given by Moy and Gastil (2006), thus including topics related to political figures, parties, institutions, and cultural, social, or national issues. We use the classification of sociopolitical subreddits by Monti et al (2022): they label the 2000 most popular subreddits in 2019 as either sociopolitical or not (by looking at their description and a sample of their posts), and obtain a set of 51 sociopolitical subreddits (see Appendix).…”

Section: Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…On the one hand, it recognizes the importance that one's views have on the external world; on the other hand, it furthers our comprehension of how we might fall victims of propaganda. Monti et al (2022) by manually labeling the 2000 most popular subreddits in 2019 as sociopolitical or not, following the definition given by Moy and Gastil (2006).…”

Section: Ethical Impactmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

On the Relation between Opinion Change and Information Consumption on Reddit

Flavio

Bonchi²,

Morales³

et al. 2023

ICWSM

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

While much attention has been devoted to the causes of opinion change, little is known about its consequences. Our study moves a first step in this direction by looking at Reddit, and in particular to the subreddit r/ChangeMyView, a community dedicated to debating one’s own opinions on a wide array of topics. We analyze changes in online information consumption behavior that arise after a self-reported opinion change, by looking at the participation to a set of sociopolitical communities. We find that people who self-report an opinion change are significantly more likely to change their future participation in a specific subset of those communities. Specifically, there is a significant association (Pearson r = 0.46) between using propaganda-like language in a community and the increase in chances of leaving it. Comparable results (Pearson r = 0.39) hold for the opposite direction, i.e., joining these same communities. In addition, the textual content of the post associated with opinion change is indicative of which communities will be joined or left: a predictive model based only on the text of this post can pinpoint these communities with an average precision@5 of 0.20. Our results establish a link between opinion change and information consumption, and highlight how online propagandistic communities act as a first gateway to internalize a shift in one’s sociopolitical opinion.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 80%

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Ethical Impactmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

On the Relation between Opinion Change and Information Consumption on Reddit

Flavio

Bonchi²,

Morales³

et al. 2023

ICWSM

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Online social media, where users can easily join communities around shared narratives ( 9–13 ), may form the ideal incubator for the growing of such conspiracy communities ( 14 , 15 ). The social media platform Reddit, in particular, has been criticized for hosting extreme right-wing content ( 16 ), and possibly boosting violent and dangerous conspiracy theories from fringe websites into mainstream discourse ( 17 , 18 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Online conspiracy communities are more resilient to deplatforming

Monti,

Cinelli,

Valensise

et al. 2023

PNAS Nexus

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Online social media foster the creation of active communities around shared narratives. Such communities may turn into incubators for conspiracy theories—some spreading violent messages that could sharpen the debate and potentially harm society. To face these phenomena, most social media platforms implemented moderation policies, ranging from posting warning labels up to deplatforming, i.e. permanently banning users. Assessing the effectiveness of content moderation is crucial for balancing societal safety while preserving the right to free speech. In this article, we compare the shift in behavior of users affected by the ban of two large communities on Reddit, GreatAwakening and FatPeopleHate, which were dedicated to spreading the QAnon conspiracy and body-shaming individuals, respectively. Following the ban, both communities partially migrated to Voat, an unmoderated Reddit clone. We estimate how many users migrate, finding that users in the conspiracy community are much more likely to leave Reddit altogether and join Voat. Then, we quantify the behavioral shift within Reddit and across Reddit and Voat by matching common users. While in general the activity of users is lower on the new platform, GreatAwakening users who decided to completely leave Reddit maintain a similar level of activity on Voat. Toxicity strongly increases on Voat in both communities. Finally, conspiracy users migrating from Reddit tend to recreate their previous social network on Voat. Our findings suggest that banning conspiracy communities hosting violent content should be carefully designed, as these communities may be more resilient to deplatforming.

show abstract