Analyzing the traits and anomalies of political discussions on reddit

Anna Guimarães, Oana Balalau, Erisa Terolli, Gerhard Weikum

Research output: Contribution to conferencePaperpeer-review

23 Scopus citations

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.

Original languageEnglish
Pages205-213
Number of pages9
StatePublished - 2019
Event13th International Conference on Web and Social Media, ICWSM 2019 - Munich, Germany
Duration: 11 Jun 201914 Jun 2019

Conference

Conference13th International Conference on Web and Social Media, ICWSM 2019
Country/TerritoryGermany
CityMunich
Period11/06/1914/06/19

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