A Tale of Two Reddits

America, Divided.

Cyril Gorlla. Dec 15th, 2020.

This election was one of the strangest in recent memory. Due to the global pandemic, online political activity played a more important role than ever.

The 7th most visited website in the United States, Reddit is a hotbed of political discussion, with millions of users participating in its political communities. These political subreddits, as Reddit communities are termed, provide an interesting place to examine online political activity during and after the election.

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Reddit's main political subreddit, r/politics, has seven million subscribers.

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Sentiment

Sentiment is a fickle thing, and it can be hard to ascertain. We can use natural language processing to analyze text data, such as comments, to determine their overall sentiment, positive or negative. We will look at comments from subreddits from across the spectrum and analyze their sentiment. Namely, /r/joebiden, /r/democrats, and /r/neoliberal on the Democratic side, and /r/conservative, /r/donaldtrump, and /r/republican on the opposite end. We will also factor in the general /r/politics subreddit.

We can see that there is rapid and abrupt variation in sentiment, as one would expect on election week. Let's look at the data by subreddit.

There appear to be some patterns emerging, especially when looking at select groups of subreddits. Let's look past election week and group the subreddits by ideological affiliation to see if we can discern any larger trends.

Things seem clearer now, looking at a wider range of time. Sentiment seems similarly erratic among all categories in the first few days of election week. On November 4th, there is a particularly large drop in positivity among Democratic subreddits, while Republican sentiment is positive. This is when early results favoring Trump were being reported. However, three days later, we see a large Democratic peak, succeeded by an even larger drop in Republican sentiment, the largest drop in the data. This is indicative of the final results of the election becoming more apparent at this point in time. We see an increase in Republican sentiment after this, perhaps bolstered by Trump's repeated declarations that he won the election. However, by November 13th federal prosecutors communicated that they had found no evidence of election fraud, solidifying Biden's win. Republican sentiment continually decreases from here, while Democratic sentiment continues its upward trend.

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Activity

Now, let's look at the activity in each subreddit. We'll measure how relatively active a subreddit is by looking at how many submissions it had on election week vs. how many submissions it usually had in prior weeks.

r/politics and r/conservative seem to have made the most gains. But what if we look at the data normalized, instead of raw numbers?

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r/joebiden had an increase of 316%, and Democratic subreddits saw the most submissions in relation to their normal amount, which was not apparent from the raw data. Lastly, breaking down the submissions per day should yield some insights about trends over the week.

We see that Democratic subreddits handily lead throughout the week, though all subreddits saw increases to submissions as is expected. The increase peaks in the middle of the week on election day proper, and submission levels largely return to normal for the Republican subreddits by the end of the week.

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States

Each US state has a subreddit. We can analyze these subreddits to find out which candidate was most mentioned in that respective state during election week. We do this by looking at a number of the top comments in each subreddit and seeing if each comment mentions Trump or Biden (or related terms).

No state had more mentions of Trump than Biden, and many states had zero mention of Trump. This could be due to low overall activity in those state subreddits, the subreddit having a biased population, or the sample being biased. Of note are states like Kentucky which are heavily Republican in reality but had only four mentions of Trump in their subreddit in this sample.

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