Navigating Multidimensional Ideologies with Reddit's Political Compass: Economic Conflict and Social Affinity
Authors: 
Ernesto Colacrai, Federico Cinus, 
Gianmarco De Francisci Morales, Michele StarniniAuthors Info & Claims
Ernesto Colacrai, Federico Cinus, Gianmarco De Francisci Morales, Michele StarniniAuthors Info & ClaimsPages 2582 - 2593
Abstract
The prevalent perspective in quantitative research on opinion dynamics flattens the landscape of the online political discourse into a traditional left--right dichotomy. While this approach helps simplify the analysis and modeling effort, it also neglects the intrinsic multidimensional richness of ideologies. In this study, we analyze social interactions on Reddit, under the lens of a multi-dimensional ideological framework: the political compass. We examine over 8 million comments posted on the subreddits /r/PoliticalCompass and /r/PoliticalCompassMemes during 2020--2022. By leveraging their self-declarations, we disentangle the ideological dimensions of users into economic (left--right) and social (libertarian--authoritarian) axes. In addition, we characterize users by their demographic attributes (age, gender, and affluence).
We find significant homophily for interactions along the social axis of the political compass and demographic attributes. Compared to a null model, interactions among individuals of similar ideology surpass expectations by 6%. In contrast, we uncover a significant heterophily along the economic axis: left/right interactions exceed expectations by 10%. Furthermore, heterophilic interactions are characterized by a higher language toxicity than homophilic interactions, which hints at a conflictual discourse between every opposite ideology. Our results help reconcile apparent contradictions in recent literature, which found a superposition of homophilic and heterophilic interactions in online political discussions. By disentangling such interactions into the economic and social axes we pave the way for a deeper understanding of opinion dynamics on social media.
Supplemental Material
MP4 File
video presentation
- Download
- 1019.84 MB
MP4 File
Supplemental video
- Download
- 211.16 MB
References
[1]
Amy Adamczyk. 2022. Religion as a Micro and Macro Property: Investigating the Multilevel Relationship between Religion and Abortion Attitudes across the Globe. European Sociological Review (March 2022), jcac017. https://doi.org/10.1093/esr/jcac017
[2]
Jisun An, Daniele Quercia, and Jon Crowcroft. 2014. Partisan Sharing: Facebook Evidence and Societal Consequences. In COSN'14: ACM Conference on Online Social Networks. 13--24.
[3]
Chris Bail. 2021. Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make Our Platforms Less Polarizing. Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780691216508
[4]
Delia Baldassarri and Andrew Gelman. 2008. Partisans without Constraint: Political Polarization and Trends in American Public Opinion. AJS, Vol. 114, 2 (Jan. 2008), 408--446. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1010098
[5]
Pablo Barberá. 2015. Birds of the same feather tweet together: Bayesian ideal point estimation using Twitter data. Political analysis, Vol. 23, 1 (2015), 76--91.
[6]
Michael Barthel, Galen Stocking, Jess Holcomb, and Amy Mitchell. 2016. Reddit news users more likely to be male, young and digital in their news preferences. Pew Research Center (2016).
[7]
Fabian Baumann, Philipp Lorenz-Spreen, Igor M. Sokolov, and Michele Starnini. 2020. Modeling Echo Chambers and Polarization Dynamics in Social Networks. Phys. Rev. Lett., Vol. 124 (Jan 2020), 048301. Issue 4. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.124.048301
[8]
Fabian Baumann, Philipp Lorenz-Spreen, Igor M. Sokolov, and Michele Starnini. 2021. Emergence of Polarized Ideological Opinions in Multidimensional Topic Spaces. Phys. Rev. X, Vol. 11, 1 (Jan. 2021), 011012. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevX.11.011012
[9]
Kenneth Benoit and Michael Laver. 2012. The dimensionality of political space: Epistemological and methodological considerations. European Union Politics, Vol. 13, 2 (June 2012), 194--218. https://doi.org/10.1177/1465116511434618
[10]
A. Bessi, F. Zollo, M. Del Vicario, M. Puliga, A. Scala, G. Caldarelli, B. Uzzi, and W. Quattrociocchi. 2016. Users polarization on Facebook and Youtube. PLOS ONE, Vol. 11, 8 (2016), e0159641.
[11]
Max Bradley and Simon Chauchard. 2022. The Ethnic Origins of Affective Polarization: Statistical Evidence from Cross-National Data. Frontiers in Political Science (2022), 64.
[12]
Tinggui Chen, Yulong Wang, Jianjun Yang, and Guodong Cong. 2021. Modeling Multidimensional Public Opinion Polarization Process under the Context of Derived Topics. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, Vol. 18, 2 (Jan. 2021), 472. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18020472
[13]
Matteo Cinelli, Gianmarco De Francisci Morales, Alessandro Galeazzi, Walter Quattrociocchi, and Michele Starnini. 2021. The Echo Chamber Effect on Social Media. PNAS: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 118, 9 (2021), e2023301118. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2023301118
[14]
Michael D Conover, Jacob Ratkiewicz, Matthew Francisco, Bruno Goncc alves, Filippo Menczer, and Alessandro Flammini. 2011. Political polarization on twitter. In Fifth international AAAI conference on weblogs and social media.
[15]
Wesley Cota, Silvio C. Ferreira, Romualdo Pastor-Satorras, and Michele Starnini. 2019. Quantifying echo chamber effects in information spreading over political communication networks. EPJ Data Science, Vol. 8, 1 (2019), 35. https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-019-0213--9
[16]
Chad Crawford, Logan Brooks, and Sandip Sen. 2013. Opposites repel: the effect of incorporating repulsion on opinion dynamics in the bounded confidence model. In Proceedings of the 2013 international conference on Autonomous agents and multi-agent systems (AAMAS '13). International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, Richland, SC, 1225--1226.
[17]
Munmun De Choudhury. 2011. Tie formation on twitter: Homophily and structure of egocentric networks. In 2011 IEEE third international conference on privacy, security, risk and trust and 2011 IEEE third international conference on social computing. IEEE, 465--470.
[18]
Gianmarco De Francisci Morales, Corrado Monti, and Michele Starnini. 2021. No Echo in the Chambers of Political Interactions on Reddit. Scientific Reports, Vol. 11 (2021), 2818. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021--81531-x
[19]
Guillaume Deffuant, David Neau, Frederic Amblard, and Gérard Weisbuch. 2000. Mixing beliefs among interacting agents. Advs. Complex Syst., Vol. 03, 01n04 (Jan. 2000), 87--98. https://doi.org/10.1142/S0219525900000078
[20]
Michela Del Vicario, Alessandro Bessi, Fabiana Zollo, Fabio Petroni, Antonio Scala, Guido Caldarelli, H Eugene Stanley, and Walter Quattrociocchi. 2015. Echo chambers in the age of misinformation. arXiv preprint arXiv:1509.00189 (2015).
[21]
Michela Del Vicario, Gianna Vivaldo, Alessandro Bessi, Fabiana Zollo, Antonio Scala, Guido Caldarelli, and Walter Quattrociocchi. 2016. Echo chambers: Emotional contagion and group polarization on facebook. Scientific reports, Vol. 6 (2016), 37825. Publisher: Nature Publishing Group.
[22]
Daniel DellaPosta, Yongren Shi, and Michael Macy. 2015. Why Do Liberals Drink Lattes? Amer. J. Sociology, Vol. 120, 5 (March 2015), 1473--1511. https://doi.org/10.1086/681254
[23]
Elizabeth Dubois and Grant Blank. 2018. The echo chamber is overstated: the moderating effect of political interest and diverse media. Information, communication & society, Vol. 21, 5 (2018), 729--745.
[24]
John V Duca and Jason L Saving. 2016. Income inequality and political polarization: time series evidence over nine decades. Review of Income and Wealth, Vol. 62, 3 (2016), 445--466.
[25]
Gunther Eysenbach and James E Till. 2001. Ethical issues in qualitative research on internet communities. Bmj, Vol. 323, 7321 (2001), 1103--1105.
[26]
Fabian Falck, Julian Marstaller, Niklas Stoehr, Sören Maucher, Jeana Ren, Andreas Thalhammer, Achim Rettinger, and Rudi Studer. 2020. Measuring Proximity Between Newspapers and Political Parties: The Sentiment Political Compass. Policy & Internet, Vol. 12, 3 (2020), 367--399. https://doi.org/10.1002/poi3.222
[27]
Bailey K. Fosdick, Daniel B. Larremore, Joel Nishimura, and Johan Ugander. 2017. Configuring Random Graph Models with Fixed Degree Sequences. Technical Report arXiv:1608.00607. arXiv. http://arxiv.org/abs/1608.00607 arXiv:1608.00607 [physics, q-bio, stat] type: article.
[28]
André Freire. 2008. Party Polarization and Citizens' Left--Right Orientations. Party Politics, Vol. 14, 2 (March 2008), 189--209. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354068807085889
[29]
Kiran Garimella, Gianmarco De Francisci Morales, Aristides Gionis, and Michael Mathioudakis. 2016. Quantifying Controversy in Social Media. In WSDM '16: 9th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining. 33--42.
[30]
Kiran Garimella, Gianmarco De Francisci Morales, Aristides Gionis, and Michael Mathioudakis. 2017a. Factors in Recommending Contrarian Content on Social Media. In 9th International ACM Web Science Conference (WebSci ). 263--266.
[31]
Kiran Garimella, Gianmarco De Francisci Morales, Aristides Gionis, and Michael Mathioudakis. 2017b. Reducing Controversy by Connecting Opposing Views. In ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM ). [best student paper award], 81--90.
[32]
Kiran Garimella, Gianmarco De Francisci Morales, Aristides Gionis, and Michael Mathioudakis. 2018. Political Discourse on Social Media: Echo Chambers, Gatekeepers, and the Price of Bipartisanship. In The Web Conference (WWW ). 913--922.
[33]
R Kelly Garrett. 2009. Echo chambers online?: Politically motivated selective exposure among Internet news users. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Vol. 14, 2 (2009), 265--285.
[34]
Eric Gilbert, Tony Bergstrom, and Karrie Karahalios. 2009. Blogs are echo chambers: Blogs are echo chambers. In 42nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. 1--10.
[35]
Andrew Guess, Brendan Nyhan, Benjamin Lyons, and Jason Reifler. 2018. Avoiding the echo chamber about echo chambers. Knight Foundation (2018).
[36]
Rainer Hegselmann and Ulrich Krause. 2002. Opinion Dynamics and Bounded Confidence Models, Analysis and Simulation. Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, Vol. 5, 3 (2002), 1--2.
[37]
Samara Klar. 2014. A multidimensional study of ideological preferences and priorities among the American public. Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 78, S1 (2014), 344--359.
[38]
Geoffrey C Layman, Thomas M Carsey, and Juliana Menasce Horowitz. 2006. Party polarization in American politics: Characteristics, causes, and consequences. Annual Review of Political Science, Vol 13, Vol. 9 (2006), 83--110.
[39]
J.C. Lester. 1994. The evolution of the political compass (and why libertarianism is not right-wing). Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems, Vol. 17, 3 (Jan. 1994), 231--241. https://doi.org/10.1016/1061--7361(94)90011--6
[40]
Jan Clifford Lester. 1995. Liberty and the political compass (or how left-wingism is anti-liberty). Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems, Vol. 18, 3 (1995), 213--216.
[41]
Jan Clifford Lester. 1996. The political compass and why libertarianism is not right-wing. Journal of social philosophy, Vol. 27, 2 (1996), 176--86.
[42]
Lilliana Mason and Julie Wronski. 2018. One tribe to bind them all: How our social group attachments strengthen partisanship. Political Psychology, Vol. 39 (2018), 257--277.
[43]
Jennifer McCoy, Tahmina Rahman, and Murat Somer. 2018. Polarization and the Global Crisis of Democracy: Common Patterns, Dynamics, and Pernicious Consequences for Democratic Polities. American Behavioral Scientist, Vol. 62, 1 (Jan. 2018), 16--42. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764218759576
[44]
Yelena Mejova, Jisun An, Gianmarco De Francisci Morales, and Haewoon Kwak. 2022. Modeling Political Activism around Gun Debate via Social Media. ACM Transactions on Social Computing (April 2022), 3532102. https://doi.org/10.1145/3532102
[45]
Lillio Mok, Michael Inzlicht, and Ashton Anderson. 2023. Echo Tunnels: Polarized News Sharing Online Runs Narrow but Deep. Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, Vol. 17 (June 2023), 662--673. https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v17i1.22177
[46]
Corrado Monti, Jacopo D'Ignazi, Michele Starnini, and Gianmarco De Francisci Morales. 2023. Evidence of Demographic rather than Ideological Segregation in News Discussion on Reddit. In Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2023. ACM, Austin TX USA, 2777--2786. https://doi.org/10.1145/3543507.3583468
[47]
Megan A Moreno, Natalie Goniu, Peter S Moreno, and Douglas Diekema. 2013. Ethics of social media research: common concerns and practical considerations. Cyberpsychology, behavior, and social networking, Vol. 16, 9 (2013), 708--713.
[48]
Jaume Ojer, Michele Starnini, and Romualdo Pastor-Satorras. 2023 a. Modeling Explosive Opinion Depolarization in Interdependent Topics. Phys. Rev. Lett., Vol. 130 (May 2023), 207401. Issue 20. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.130.207401
[49]
Jaume Ojer, Michele Starnini, and Romualdo Pastor-Satorras. 2023 b. Vanishing threshold in depolarization of correlated opinions on social networks. arxiv: 2306.01329 [physics.soc-ph]
[50]
Andreas Petrik. 2010. Core concept “Political Compass”. How Kitschelt's model of liberal, socialist, libertarian and conservative orientations can fill the ideology gap in civic education. JSSE-Journal of Social Science Education (2010).
[51]
Joseph Phillips. 2022. Affective Polarization: Over Time, Through the Generations, and During the Lifespan. Political Behavior (2022), 1--26.
[52]
Diana Ram'irez-Cifuentes, Ana Freire, Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Joaquim Punt'i, Pilar Medina-Bravo, Diego Alejandro Velazquez, Josep Maria Gonfaus, and Jordi Gonzàlez. 2020. Detection of suicidal ideation on social media: multimodal, relational, and behavioral analysis. J. of medical internet research, Vol. 22, 7 (2020), e17758.
[53]
Samuel C Rhodes. 2022. Filter bubbles, echo chambers, and fake news: how social media conditions individuals to be less critical of political misinformation. Political Communication, Vol. 39, 1 (2022), 1--22.
[54]
Cesare Rollo, Gianmarco De Francisci Morales, Corrado Monti, and André Panisson. 2022. Communities, Gateways, and Bridges: Measuring Attention Flow in the Reddit Political Sphere. In Social Informatics: 13th International Conference, SocInfo 2022, Glasgow, UK, October 19--21, 2022, Proceedings. Springer, 3--19.
[55]
Ana Luc'ia Schmidt, Fabiana Zollo, Antonio Scala, Cornelia Betsch, and Walter Quattrociocchi. 2018. Polarization of the vaccination debate on Facebook. Vaccine, Vol. 36, 25 (2018), 3606--3612.
[56]
Simon Schweighofer, David Garcia, and Frank Schweitzer. 2020. An agent-based model of multi-dimensional opinion dynamics and opinion alignment. Chaos, Vol. 30, 9 (Sept. 2020), 093139. https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0007523
[57]
Alexander J. Stewart, Nolan McCarty, and Joanna J. Bryson. 2020. Polarization under rising inequality and economic decline. Science Advances, Vol. 6, 50 (Dec. 2020), eabd4201. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abd4201
[58]
Michael Storper. 2018. Separate Worlds ? Explaining the Current Wave of Regional Economic Polarization. Journal of Economic Geography, Vol. 18, 2 (March 2018), 247--270. https://doi.org/10.1093/jeg/lby011
[59]
Petter Törnberg. 2018. Echo chambers and viral misinformation: Modeling fake news as complex contagion. PLoS one, Vol. 13, 9 (2018), e0203958.
[60]
Petter Törnberg. 2022. How digital media drive affective polarization through partisan sorting. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 119, 42 (Oct. 2022), e2207159119. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2207159119
[61]
Brian Uzzi, Satyam Mukherjee, Michael Stringer, and Ben Jones. 2013. Atypical combinations and scientific impact. Science, Vol. 342, 6157 (2013), 468--472.
[62]
James A Vela-McConnell. 1999. Who is my neighbor? Social affinity in a modern world. SUNY Press.
[63]
Isaac Waller and Ashton Anderson. 2021. Quantifying social organization and political polarization in online platforms. Nature, Vol. 600, 7888 (2021), 264--268.
[64]
Ingmar Weber, Venkata R. Kiran Garimella, and Alaa Batayneh. 2013. Secular vs. Islamist polarization in egypt on twitter. In 2013 IEEE/ACM international conference on advances in social networks analysis and mining (ASONAM ). 290--297. https://doi.org/10.1145/2492517.2492557showDOI
Index Terms
- Navigating Multidimensional Ideologies with Reddit's Political Compass: Economic Conflict and Social Affinity
Recommendations
Managing political differences in social media
CSCW '14: Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computingMost people associate with people like themselves, a process called homophily. Exposure to diversity, however, makes us more informed as individuals and as a society. In this paper, we investigate political disagreements on Facebook to explore the ...
Bot Detection in Reddit Political Discussion
SocialSense'19: Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Social SensingThe existence of social media bots on political forums can muddle the perception of public opinion. Bot detection has been successful on platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Youtube. However, our research focuses on characterizing suspicious behavior ...
Social Media Use, Political Polarization, and Social Capital: Is Social Media Tearing the U.S. Apart?
Social Computing and Social Media. Design, Ethics, User Behavior, and Social Network AnalysisAbstractWhile some polarization is potentially beneficial for democracy, hyper-polarization can lead to political gridlock, tribalism, and even physical violence. Given the gravity of these concerns, we use data from 1,424 residents of Virginia, USA to ...
Comments
Information & Contributors
Information
Published In
May 2024
4826 pages
ISBN:9798400701719
DOI:10.1145/3589334
- General Chairs:
- Tat-Seng Chua,
- Chong-Wah Ngo,
- Proceedings Chair:
- Roy Ka-Wei Lee,
- Program Chairs:
- Ravi Kumar,
- Hady W. Lauw
Copyright © 2024 ACM.
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].
Sponsors
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
New York, NY, United States
Publication History
Published: 13 May 2024
Check for updates
Badges
Author Tags
Qualifiers
- Research-article
Conference
WWW '24
Sponsor:
Acceptance Rates
Overall Acceptance Rate 1,899 of 8,196 submissions, 23%
Contributors
Other Metrics
Bibliometrics & Citations
Bibliometrics
Article Metrics
- 0Total Citations
- 123Total Downloads
- Downloads (Last 12 months)123
- Downloads (Last 6 weeks)10
Reflects downloads up to 22 Dec 2024
Other Metrics
Citations
View Options
Login options
Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.
Sign in