Comparing Apples and Oranges: Recognizing Political Heterogeneity on Reddit and Its Implications for Behavioral Analysis

Anonymous

Abstract: Reddit is home to a broad spectrum of political activity and users signal their political affiliations in multiple ways—from self-declarations to community participation. Commonly, political studies have assumed political users are a single bloc, both in developing models to infer political leaning and in studying political behavior. Here, test this model assumption of political users. We show that a variety of commonly-used political-inference approaches models do not generalize, indicating heterogeneous types of political users, and remains imprecise at best for most users, regardless of which sources of data or methods are used. Across a 14-year longitudinal analysis, we demonstrate that the choice in definition of a political user has significant implications for behavioral analysis. Controlling for multiple factors, political users are more toxic on the platform and inter-party interactions are even more toxic---but not all political users behave this way. Last, we identify a subset of political users who repeatedly flip affiliations, showing that these users are the most controversial of all, acting as provocateurs by more frequently bringing up politics, and are more likely to be banned, suspended, or deleted.