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Easy writer 7th edition reddit8/17/2023 ![]() It was a fundamental platform for the success of Donald Trump’s political campaign 23. Reddit is a social news aggregation website, in 2016, it was the seventh most visited website in United States, with more than 200 million visitors. We focus on Reddit as a platform where to study political interactions between groups with opposite views. In this paper, we consider a highly polarized issue, the 2016 US presidential elections, and investigate the role of echo chambers on social media in exacerbating the debate. In particular, the effect of echo chambers in increasing political polarization has been put under scrutiny 21, 22. However, the very existence of such echo chambers has been recently questioned 20, 21, as well as their relation with the news feed algorithm of different social media platforms 14. Many have expressed concern that, as citizens become more polarized about political issues, they do not hear the arguments of the opposite side, but are rather surrounded by people and news sources who express only opinions they agree with (e.g., Mark Zuckerberg 19). Echo chambers have been empirically observed and characterized around several controversial topics, such as abortion or vaccines 13, 18. The dynamics leading to echo chambers on online social networks have been associated to selective exposure 15, biased assimilation 16, and group polarization 17 in particular, Garrett 10 pointed to the pursuit of opinion reinforcement as a possible cause. Echo chambers are situations in which users have their beliefs reinforced due to repeated interactions with like-minded peers and insulation from others’ points of view 13, 14. Several scholars have identified social media itself as a cause of polarization, citing “echo chambers” as a cause 10– 12. Polarized issues fall not only along ideological fault-lines 4, but can also touch on any collectively resonant topic 9. On Twitter, in particular, political polarization can be exacerbated by social bots that amplify divisive messages 8. Indeed, several platforms have been the subject of polarization studies, from Twitter, to YouTube, to Facebook 4– 7. This polarization is easy to observe online, and especially on social media, where people share their opinions liberally. ![]() Polarization along party lines in the United States is on the rise 2, and 2016 elections have deepen the divide 3. Polarization is a defining feature of contemporary politics 1. Our findings shed light on public opinion formation on social media, calling for a better understanding of the social dynamics at play in this context. Users show a tendency for geographical homophily and a small positive correlation between cross-interactions and voter abstention. Finally, we explore possible socio-demographic implications. Our findings are tested against a null model of random interactions, by using two different approaches: a network rewiring which preserves the activity of nodes, and a logit regression which takes into account possible confounding factors. Beside asymmetric heterophily, users show assortative behavior for activity, and disassortative, asymmetric behavior for popularity. Furthermore, these interactions are asymmetrical: Clinton supporters are particularly eager to answer comments by Trump supporters. We observe a preference for cross-cutting political interactions between the two communities rather than within-group interactions, thus contradicting the echo chamber narrative. We identify Trump vs Clinton supporters and reconstruct their political interaction network. Here, we investigate their role in the debate around the 2016 US elections on Reddit, a fundamental platform for the success of Donald Trump. Echo chambers in online social networks, whereby users’ beliefs are reinforced by interactions with like-minded peers and insulation from others’ points of view, have been decried as a cause of political polarization.
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