The Impact of Crowds On News Engagement: A Reddit Case Study

Horne, Benjamin D.; Adalı, Sibel

doi:10.1609/icwsm.v11i1.14977

Cited by 16 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…Reddit has already been studied within a rich set of research frameworks. For instance, the study of user engagement and interactions between highly related communities ( 44 , 45 ), the analysis of post-election political analyses ( 46 ), or the impact of linguistic differences in news titles ( 47 ). Interestingly, it has already been used to explore harmful social dynamics on online social media such as hate speech ( 42 ) or cyberbullying ( 48 ).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Online conspiracy communities are more resilient to deplatforming

Monti,

Cinelli,

Valensise

et al. 2023

PNAS Nexus

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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.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Online conspiracy communities are more resilient to deplatforming

Monti,

Cinelli,

Valensise

et al. 2023

PNAS Nexus

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“…As with extremism and terrorism research, data access and data sharing in the disinformation research community is an ongoing struggle. Pushshift data has already been used in a number of papers on disinformation and social media trustworthiness (Crothers, Japkowicz, and Viktor 2019;Horne and Adali 2017;Zannettou et al 2019;Zhou et al 2019).…”

Section: Author Flair Textmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Pushshift Reddit Dataset

Baumgartner¹,

Zannettou

Keegan

et al. 2020

ICWSM

455

191

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Social media data has become crucial to the advancement of scientific understanding. However, even though it has become ubiquitous, just collecting large-scale social media data involves a high degree of engineering skill set and computational resources. In fact, research is often times gated by data engineering problems that must be overcome before analysis can proceed. This has resulted recognition of datasets as meaningful research contributions in and of themselves.Reddit, the so called “front page of the Internet,” in particular has been the subject of numerous scientific studies. Although Reddit is relatively open to data acquisition compared to social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, the technical barriers to acquisition still remain. Thus, Reddit's millions of subreddits, hundreds of millions of users, and billions of comments are at the same time relatively accessible, but time consuming to collect and analyze systematically.In this paper, we present the Pushshift Reddit dataset. Pushshift is a social media data collection, analysis, and archiving platform that since 2015 has collected Reddit data and made it available to researchers. Pushshift's Reddit dataset is updated in real-time, and includes historical data back to Reddit's inception. In addition to monthly dumps, Pushshift provides computational tools to aid in searching, aggregating, and performing exploratory analysis on the entirety of the dataset. The Pushshift Reddit dataset makes it possible for social media researchers to reduce time spent in the data collection, cleaning, and storage phases of their projects.

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“…Most fake news datasets include text information; thus, the majority of relevant studies focus on employing text data in detecting fake news. These text datasets include LIAR [ 90 ], BuzzFeed News [ 91 ], Fake News Challenges (FNC-1 dataset) [ 92 ], and Some-Like-It-Hoax [ 89 ]. There is a dearth of multi-modal datasets in this problem space [ 20 ].…”

Section: Challenges Of Fake News Detection Modelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A review of fake news detection approaches: A critical analysis of relevant studies and highlighting key challenges associated with the dataset, feature representation, and data fusion

Hamed,

Ab Aziz,

Yaakub

2023

Heliyon

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The Impact of Crowds On News Engagement: A Reddit Case Study

Cited by 16 publications

References 23 publications

Online conspiracy communities are more resilient to deplatforming

Online conspiracy communities are more resilient to deplatforming

The Pushshift Reddit Dataset

A review of fake news detection approaches: A critical analysis of relevant studies and highlighting key challenges associated with the dataset, feature representation, and data fusion

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