A POLARIZED AMERICA
To what extent does this shape the social media?
Background
Riots in the streets and accusations of electoral fraud are not rare phenomenons when it comes to the election for the next president of USA in 2020. A rising polarization seems to split the nation in half. But what is the cause of this partitioning and are the Democrats and Republicans all that different after all? Concurrent with the growth of the information society, the election of 2020 is the most documented election of all time. An investigation of this data might lead to the root cause of this unpleasant division of the nation.
​
Our Idea
Our idea for this project is to detect community patterns in behavior for political active people on social medias. More specificly on the american subject oriented platform Reddit - a platform with more than 430 million monthly active users.
​
With the use of network and text analysis, the users' activity on reddit is measured and explored, showing candidate or belief releated communities and revealing subjects of interests across, as well as within, parties.
Data used
Data Extraction
We use the Reddit API through the PRAW wrapper to scrape the two subreddits:
​
r/DonaldTrump
r/JoeBiden
​
From these sites the 36 all time top threads are run through and the top 48 comments related to the threads are collected. Furthermore information about the authors to the comments is extracted. We collect 50 subreddits for each user from their top ranked comments of all time. Collecting a total of 2697 comments and 6595 subreddit constituting 4 Mb of data.
​
This exciting data on users writing on the two 2020 presidential candidates of USA can be analysed with text and network analysis! We are interested in investigating how users connect based on their reddit activity. In order to do so, we can construct a network of users, where users connect according to how similar their activity is on different subreddits!
Network Construction
Extracting the Bipartite Network
The first step of the network construction is done by linking each Trump and Biden user to the subreddits, they have commented on (r/DonaldTrump and r/JoeBiden excluded). This forms what is called a bipartite network of Users and Subreddits.
.jpg)
Connecting Users
To visualize the mutual interests on reddit in the network, users are connected to one another if the users have commented on the same subreddits (r/DonaldTrump and r/JoeBiden excluded).
.jpg)
Weighting of Links
To preserve as much information as possible from the bipartite network, connections/links between users are weighted based on the number of common subreddits.
.jpg)
Final Network
Final Network
The Resulting network consists of:
-
2697 Nodes representing reddit users
-
1,860,379 Weighted edges
-
49.6% Trump Users
-
50.4% Biden Users
Other Data​
Furthermore the following data is collected:
-
6595 Unique Subreddits
-
2697 Unique Comments containing on average 24 words
So what do users of this network typically comment on?
Below you see the 100 most popular subreddits among the users of our data. This show that aside from the globally most popular subreddits like Ask Reddit…, Funny, etc. Trump and Biden users are very active on Politics, news, COVID-19, atheism, conspiracies and many more!
