research-article

Evidence of Demographic rather than Ideological Segregation in News Discussion on Reddit

Authors:

Jacopo D'Ignazi,

Michele Starnini,

Gianmarco De Francisci MoralesAuthors Info & Claims

WWW '23: Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2023

Pages 2777 - 2786

https://doi.org/10.1145/3543507.3583468

Published: 30 April 2023 Publication History

Abstract

We evaluate homophily and heterophily among ideological and demographic groups in a typical opinion formation context: online discussions of current news. We analyze user interactions across five years in the r/news community on Reddit, one of the most visited websites in the United States. Then, we estimate demographic and ideological attributes of these users. Thanks to a comparison with a carefully-crafted network null model, we establish which pairs of attributes foster interactions and which ones inhibit them.

Individuals prefer to engage with the opposite ideological side, which contradicts the echo chamber narrative. Instead, demographic groups are homophilic, as individuals tend to interact within their own group—even in an online setting where such attributes are not directly observable. In particular, we observe age and income segregation consistently across years: users tend to avoid interactions when belonging to different groups. These results persist after controlling for the degree of interest by each demographic group in different news topics. Our findings align with the theory that affective polarization—the difficulty in socializing across political boundaries—is more connected with an increasingly divided society, rather than ideological echo chambers on social media. We publicly release our anonymized data set and all the code to reproduce our results.1

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Cited By

Lenti JMonti CDe Francisci Morales GAngélica LLattanzi SMuñoz Medina AAkoglu LGionis AVassilvitskii S(2024)Likelihood-Based Methods Improve Parameter Estimation in Opinion Dynamics ModelsProceedings of the 17th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining10.1145/3616855.3635785(350-359)Online publication date: 4-Mar-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3616855.3635785
Colacrai ECinus FDe Francisci Morales GStarnini MChua TNgo CKa-Wei Lee RKumar RLauw H(2024)Navigating Multidimensional Ideologies with Reddit's Political Compass: Economic Conflict and Social AffinityProceedings of the ACM Web Conference 202410.1145/3589334.3645606(2582-2593)Online publication date: 13-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3589334.3645606
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https://doi.org/10.1080/0144929X.2024.2349183
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Evidence of Demographic rather than Ideological Segregation in News Discussion on Reddit

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cover image ACM Conferences

WWW '23: Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2023

April 2023

4293 pages

ISBN:9781450394161

DOI:10.1145/3543507

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Published: 30 April 2023

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Lenti JMonti CDe Francisci Morales GAngélica LLattanzi SMuñoz Medina AAkoglu LGionis AVassilvitskii S(2024)Likelihood-Based Methods Improve Parameter Estimation in Opinion Dynamics ModelsProceedings of the 17th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining10.1145/3616855.3635785(350-359)Online publication date: 4-Mar-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3616855.3635785
Colacrai ECinus FDe Francisci Morales GStarnini MChua TNgo CKa-Wei Lee RKumar RLauw H(2024)Navigating Multidimensional Ideologies with Reddit's Political Compass: Economic Conflict and Social AffinityProceedings of the ACM Web Conference 202410.1145/3589334.3645606(2582-2593)Online publication date: 13-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3589334.3645606
Meier YKrämer N(2024)Differences in access to privacy information can partly explain digital inequalities in privacy literacy and self-efficacyBehaviour & Information Technology10.1080/0144929X.2024.2349183(1-16)Online publication date: 3-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.1080/0144929X.2024.2349183
Aletti GCrimaldi IGhiglietti A(2023)Interacting innovation processesScientific Reports10.1038/s41598-023-43967-113:1Online publication date: 11-Oct-2023
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-43967-1

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