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Center for Nonlinear Studies |
Social media has democratized both the consumption and dissemination of information online, creating opportunities to spread mis/disinformation with unprecedented ease. As a community-driven discussion platform with little top-down content moderation, Reddit is particularly hospitable to the dissemination of mis/disinformation. To better understand how information spreads on a platform relying on "collaborative filtering" of content, this study first seeks to identify the textual and linguistic characteristics of posts that successfully gain traction within the Reddit structure. As a first step, I employ grammatical analysis and various natural language processing techniques to explore a variety of features of these texts (i.e., author sentiment and subjectivity, topical content, and linguistic complexity). Through these analyses, I construct a textual profile of submission posts that generate a greater response from users on the platform. In the following phase, I will use this textual profile to train a machine learning model to identify social media posts that are more likely to spread efficiently through user-regulated online communities.
Host: Nidhi Parikh (A-1), Johnny Seales Jr. (A-1)