Unsorted Significance: Examining Potential Pathways to Extreme Political Beliefs and Communities on Reddit

Abstract

Violent political extremists often point to online communities as motivating their behavior. However, researchers studying online exposure to extremism through structural mechanisms such as algorithms have not found strong evidence of their influence. At the same time, models of offline radicalization processes emphasize the importance of personal motivations, such as desire for significance and community, but do not fully account for online contexts. The authors integrate these approaches, which are both interested in worsening political extremism, asking, (1) What are the pathways to extreme content and communities online? and (2) What are the perceptions of extremism in online communities? Through interviews with politically active Redditors, the authors identify three motivations for initial engagement with fringe political communities: political unsorting of the self, political exceptionalism, and virtuous participation. The authors argue these motivations are potentially important seeds of political extremism and discuss the implications for supporting healthy political discourse online.

How Symbols Influence Social Media Discourse: An Embedding Regression Analysis of Trump’s Return to Twitter

“…motivating a recent headline-"Now Is the Time to Pay Attention to Trump's Violent Language" (Kingsbury 2023)it might be that a post's instructions (i.e., "go after") inspire a user to commit violence, but it could also be that a user is inspired by the fact that they read the words on a platform that symbolized a home community (e.g., Truth Social) or because of racial narratives evoked by the post's targets (i.e., New York's attorney general, who is a Black woman, and "shoplifters"). To offer another example, when Mann et al (2023) analyzed the pathways to extremism on Reddit, they observed that users valued certain fora because of other users' comments-the lexical component of content-as well as the names of the fora, such as "nonmainstream ideas, such as r/anarchism or r/libertarian," which intimated that users were "allowed to disagree with each other on certain points" (p. 7).…”