Quantifying social organization and political polarization in online platforms
This addresses the challenge of quantifying online polarization for platform designers and social scientists, offering a novel measurement approach with implications for understanding digital society.
The researchers tackled the problem of measuring social organization and political polarization in online platforms by developing a neural embedding methodology to analyze 5.1 billion Reddit comments over 14 years, finding that a significant polarization event occurred around the 2016 U.S. presidential election, driven by new users and showing ideological asymmetry with changes attributable to right-wing activity.
Optimism about the Internet's potential to bring the world together has been tempered by concerns about its role in inflaming the 'culture wars'. Via mass selection into like-minded groups, online society may be becoming more fragmented and polarized, particularly with respect to partisan differences. However, our ability to measure the social makeup of online communities, and in turn understand the social organization of online platforms, is limited by the pseudonymous, unstructured, and large-scale nature of digital discussion. We develop a neural embedding methodology to quantify the positioning of online communities along social dimensions by leveraging large-scale patterns of aggregate behaviour. Applying our methodology to 5.1B Reddit comments made in 10K communities over 14 years, we measure how the macroscale community structure is organized with respect to age, gender, and U.S. political partisanship. Examining political content, we find Reddit underwent a significant polarization event around the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and remained highly polarized for years afterward. Contrary to conventional wisdom, however, individual-level polarization is rare; the system-level shift in 2016 was disproportionately driven by the arrival of new and newly political users. Political polarization on Reddit is unrelated to previous activity on the platform, and is instead temporally aligned with external events. We also observe a stark ideological asymmetry, with the sharp increase in 2016 being entirely attributable to changes in right-wing activity. Our methodology is broadly applicable to the study of online interaction, and our findings have implications for the design of online platforms, understanding the social contexts of online behaviour, and quantifying the dynamics and mechanisms of online polarization.