Incivility on Popular Politics and News Subreddits: An Analysis of In-groups, Community Guidelines and Relationships with Social Media Engagement
Incivility on Popular Politics and News Subreddits: An Analysis of In-groups, Community Guidelines and Relationships with Social Media Engagement
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Date
2023-01-03
Authors
Vargo, Chris
Hopp, Tobias
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2421
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Abstract
Political and news subreddits are individualistic as it pertains to the incivility we might expect them to exhibit; some have clear in-group members, and all have varying degrees of content moderation policies. We sample submissions (n = 127,870) and comments (n = 2,576,049) from 20 of the most popular news and politics subreddits from June 4th, 2021, to June 4th, 2022. All subreddits appear to be mostly civil, with incivility most commonly occurring in comments. When incivility occurs, it tends to take on less-severe forms including insults, profanity, and general toxicity. Subreddits with with clear political in-groups did exhibit more insults, toxicity, profanity, and identity-based attacks. The more complex a subreddit’s moderation policies, the less incivility was observed. Finally, uncivil submissions do result in a mild increase in engagement, but given the overall low prevalence of incivility observed, it appears not to be integral to a subreddit’s overall engagement.
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Mediated Conversation,
community guidelines,
content moderation,
incivility,
out-groups,
reddit
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10
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Proceedings of the 56th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
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Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
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