Roots of Trumpism: Homophily and Social Feedback in Donald Trump Support on Reddit

Massachs, Joan; Monti, Corrado; Morales, Gianmarco De Francisci; Bonchi, Francesco

doi:10.1145/3394231.3397894

Cited by 26 publications

(28 citation statements)

References 30 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Participation in this subreddit is a valid proxy to study Donald Trump support, as the rules of this subreddit explicitly state that the community is for "Trump Supporters Only", and that dissenting users will be removed. As such, it has been previously used in literature to analyze the behavior of Trump supporters 34,35 . r/hilla rycli nton and r/Hilla ryFor Ameri ca are the main communities that supported the Hillary Clinton's campaign in 2016.…”

Section: Political Leaning Of Reddit Usersmentioning

confidence: 99%

No echo in the chambers of political interactions on Reddit

Morales

Monti

Starnini

2021

Sci Rep

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Echo chambers in online social networks, whereby users’ beliefs are reinforced by interactions with like-minded peers and insulation from others’ points of view, have been decried as a cause of political polarization. Here, we investigate their role in the debate around the 2016 US elections on Reddit, a fundamental platform for the success of Donald Trump. We identify Trump vs Clinton supporters and reconstruct their political interaction network. We observe a preference for cross-cutting political interactions between the two communities rather than within-group interactions, thus contradicting the echo chamber narrative. Furthermore, these interactions are asymmetrical: Clinton supporters are particularly eager to answer comments by Trump supporters. Beside asymmetric heterophily, users show assortative behavior for activity, and disassortative, asymmetric behavior for popularity. Our findings are tested against a null model of random interactions, by using two different approaches: a network rewiring which preserves the activity of nodes, and a logit regression which takes into account possible confounding factors. Finally, we explore possible socio-demographic implications. Users show a tendency for geographical homophily and a small positive correlation between cross-interactions and voter abstention. Our findings shed light on public opinion formation on social media, calling for a better understanding of the social dynamics at play in this context.

show abstract

Section: Political Leaning Of Reddit Usersmentioning

confidence: 99%

No echo in the chambers of political interactions on Reddit

Morales

Monti

Starnini

2021

Sci Rep

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The right-leaning community of Donald Trump supporters of r/The_Donald was repeatedly denounced for toxicity, trolling, and harassment [25,33,43,45]. As a result of such misbehavior, it faced a sequence of increasingly restrictive moderation interventions by Reddit administrators:…”

Section: Moderating R/the_donaldmentioning

confidence: 99%

Make Reddit Great Again: Assessing Community Effects of Moderation Interventions on r/The_Donald

Trujillo,

Cresci

2022

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The subreddit r/The_Donald was repeatedly denounced as a toxic and misbehaving online community, reasons for which it faced a sequence of increasingly constraining moderation interventions by Reddit administrators. It was quarantined in June 2019, restricted in February 2020, and finally banned in June 2020, but despite precursory work on the matter, the effects of this sequence of interventions are still unclear. In this work, we follow a multidimensional causal inference approach to study data containing more than 15M posts made in a time frame of 2 years, to examine the effects of such interventions within and without the subreddit. We find that the interventions had strong positive effects toward reducing the activity of problematic users both inside and outside of r/The_Donald. However, the interventions also caused an increase in toxicity and led users to share more polarized and less factual news. Additional findings of our study are that the restriction had stronger effects than the quarantine and that core users of r/The_Donald suffered stronger effects than the other users. Overall, our results provide evidence that the interventions had mixed effects and paint a nuanced picture of the consequences of community-level moderation strategies. We conclude by reflecting on the challenges of policing online platforms and by discussing implications for the design and deployment of moderation interventions.CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in collaborative and social computing; • Information systems → Social networks; Social networking sites.

show abstract

“…Further, self posts tend to be more regulated by forum moderators, suggesting that they are more likely to reflect the norms of the community. r/The_Donald and its role in alt-right politics (Massachs et al, 2020;Ribeiro et al, 2020;Shepherd, 2020), as well as conspiracy theorists on the platform (Klein et al, 2019;Phadke et al, 2021;Samory and Mitra, 2018). Research has indicated a sizable and statistically significant overlap in users between the two subreddits (Massachs et al, 2020;Nithyanand et al, 2017).…”

Section: Wmd and Interpretabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…r/The_Donald and its role in alt-right politics (Massachs et al, 2020;Ribeiro et al, 2020;Shepherd, 2020), as well as conspiracy theorists on the platform (Klein et al, 2019;Phadke et al, 2021;Samory and Mitra, 2018). Research has indicated a sizable and statistically significant overlap in users between the two subreddits (Massachs et al, 2020;Nithyanand et al, 2017). However, these observations have been largely based on subreddit cosubscriber networks, and have paid comparatively less attention to large-scale linguistic patterns over time, a gap to which we hope to contribute.…”

Section: Wmd and Interpretabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

WMDecompose: A Framework for Leveraging the Interpretable Properties of Word Mover’s Distance in Sociocultural Analysis

Brunila¹,

LaViolette

2021

Proceedings of the 5th Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities An

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Despite the increasing popularity of NLP in the humanities and social sciences, advances in model performance and complexity have been accompanied by concerns about interpretability and explanatory power for sociocultural analysis.One popular model that balances complexity and legibility is Word Mover's Distance (WMD). Ostensibly adapted for its interpretability, WMD has nonetheless been used and further developed in ways which frequently discard its most interpretable aspect: namely, the word-level distances required for translating a set of words into another set of words. To address this apparent gap, we introduce WMDecompose: a model and Python library that 1) decomposes document-level distances into their constituent word-level distances, and 2) subsequently clusters words to induce thematic elements, such that useful lexical information is retained and summarized for analysis. To illustrate its potential in a social scientific context, we apply it to a longitudinal social media corpus to explore the interrelationship between conspiracy theories and conservative American discourses. Finally, because of the full WMD model's high time-complexity, we additionally suggest a method of sampling document pairs from large datasets in a reproducible way, with tight bounds that prevent extrapolation of unreliable results due to poor sampling practices.

show abstract

Roots of Trumpism: Homophily and Social Feedback in Donald Trump Support on Reddit

Cited by 26 publications

References 30 publications

No echo in the chambers of political interactions on Reddit

No echo in the chambers of political interactions on Reddit

Make Reddit Great Again: Assessing Community Effects of Moderation Interventions on r/The_Donald

WMDecompose: A Framework for Leveraging the Interpretable Properties of Word Mover’s Distance in Sociocultural Analysis

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About