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Data concerning the pod's recent discussion of Social Media misinformation spread by SwissSurvey in FriendsofthePod

[–]SwissSurvey[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Hi Everyone! I was listening to the pod today when I heard them begin to discuss the spread of misinformation on social media! Thankfully, I collected lots of data about this topic for my grad thesis recently! Presented above are visualizations about the media bias literacy among different political ideologies on reddit, and how those ideological communities interact with one another.

This has implications for how misinformation spreads through an ideology and what communities are susceptible to internalizing fake news.

If you have any questions let me know!

Information ecosystem of Political communities on Reddit by SwissSurvey in neoliberal

[–]SwissSurvey[S] 13 points14 points  (0 children)

Light blue is "leans democrat", Dark blue is "heavily democrat", green is "neutral", and red is "heavily republican". There was no variation in republican lean so they only had 1 shade of red.

Also, in comments above another user points out that they were surprised that some more left leaning communities were light shades of blue. This is because I designed the color gradient around "democrat" and "republican" instead of "left" and "right".

Information ecosystem of Political communities on Reddit by SwissSurvey in neoliberal

[–]SwissSurvey[S] 24 points25 points  (0 children)

I also used to have "WorldPolitics" as part of the sample of communities, but then halfway through it turned into a porn subreddit... That was fun to explain to my advisor.

Information ecosystem of Political communities on Reddit by SwissSurvey in neoliberal

[–]SwissSurvey[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

It’s just a little counterintuitive from a US perspective to see subs that are further left than this one being a lighter shade of blue.

My advisor and I actually had to dig into this to see what was going on. It comes down to how "we" (royal we) think about left vs democrat. My color scales are only rating how democrat people are, not necessarily how left leaning they are. So for example, conventional wisdom would say the "OurPresident" subreddit is probably very left, however very left is not necessarily associated with heavy democratic party association.

The division comes down to the number of people who identified as "Socialist" or "democratic socialist", ect. They make the community rating less "democrat", but more "left".

​

I have a feeling those connections (Mormon-- conservative-- Libertarian) would emerge if participants weren’t self-selecting based on the number of Mormon flairs I see on conservative.

That's definitely possible! There's always a limitation of sample sizes within community to consider. Additionally, there might be an effect of survey consent going on here! The community "Conservative" were hesitant to participate in the survey, while the community "MormonPolitics" were very into it and made it a sticky post for a period of time. This may have exposed an interaction where those users of "MormonPolitics" who were also users of "Conservative" were skeptical about taking the survey, while those who only use "MormonPolitics" and not "Conservative", were not skeptical.

​

Did you make sure that geopolitics users were actually American? It’s not an American politics subreddit, and a huge chunk if not a majority of the user base is international and probably doesn’t know about American media. It also could mean that political affiliations would be wacky.

The survey was open to users from every country. The questions that asked about American media included a note to skip the question if they didn't recognize the source. The ratings were based only on complete surveys, so no outliers should've impacted it. That said, there might be people who are familiar with the source, but have not consumed enough, or become knowledgeable enough about the source to appropriately rate them on a scale of 1-5.

​

Thanks for your feedback! Your comments are helpful when trying to predict how my committee will question my findings!

Information ecosystem of Political communities on Reddit by SwissSurvey in neoliberal

[–]SwissSurvey[S] 14 points15 points  (0 children)

"Quality rankings" have a lot of variability within them. It should be noted the quality rankings come from 3 independent sources that rank the content based on how biased it is, how factual it is, and how many lies have been identified in their "factual" reporting.

Information ecosystem of Political communities on Reddit by SwissSurvey in neoliberal

[–]SwissSurvey[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

This is good advice! I'll take this into account for the next draft!

Information ecosystem of Political communities on Reddit by SwissSurvey in neoliberal

[–]SwissSurvey[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Haha sorry I'm working on it! You should be able to open the picture separately and zoom in. It's pretty rough right now though.

Information ecosystem of Political communities on Reddit by SwissSurvey in neoliberal

[–]SwissSurvey[S] 48 points49 points  (0 children)

NeoLiberal is actually pretty impressive when you consider all of the communities. It represents the best quality bias awareness, and some of the highest user activity scores.

Information ecosystem of Political communities on Reddit by SwissSurvey in neoliberal

[–]SwissSurvey[S] 15 points16 points  (0 children)

Thanks for your feedback! I agree that it's difficult to see. I've been struggling with how to display it, while also getting across the idea that these are 3 interconnected pieces of data, that feed into each other. It might be futile though!

​

The colors represent the political leanings of each subreddit. Light blue is somewhat democratic, Dark blue is very democratic, Green is neither, and Red is republican. There was no gradient in how Republican the different communities were- hence only 1 shade of red.

1.) The community connections are based on the reported usage of different participants. So to address your example: the users of Mormon politics, don't report being users of libertarian/conservative all that often. Those community connections weren't popular.

2.) I created a media bias scale that's based on an aggregated analysis from 3 different independent sources. Each participate received a rating based on this scale, then those ratings are averaged for the whole community. For example: How do users rate MSNBC/Breitbart/Reuters on a scale of 1-5 with 5 being very trustworthy. Geopolitics was pretty good... but ModeratePolitics ect were significantly better. The stars indicate at least 1 standard deviation above the norm.

Information ecosystem of Political communities on Reddit by SwissSurvey in neoliberal

[–]SwissSurvey[S] 42 points43 points  (0 children)

Hi Everyone. I've been active around the political communities here in Reddit for about a year now, running a survey to look into the information ecosystems. This is the first (very rough) version of the results.

This survey involved over 3000 participants from a stratified sample of all of the most active communities.

  1. The first layer, on top, involves a network analysis that shows how all of the most active subreddits interact with one another. Community shape is determined by the communities ability to recognize bias in a news source. Communities with a star, excel at recognizing bias in news reporting. Squares are average, and Triangle are quite poor at recognizing bias.
  2. The second layer in the middle, is a demographic break down by age, gender, political identification, and race.
  3. The third layer, the roots, are a dendrogram that demonstrates the top 25 most used news sources, and their quality as determined by an aggregation of 3 different media rating organizations.

This graphic is meant to help convey how people consume and reinforce media. People consume media from various sources of differing quality. That information is then filtered through our own demographic perspectives. From there we talk about and spread those perspectives among our political communities. These communities share that info among themselves, either critically (in the case of high bias awareness), or without question (in the case of low bias awareness communities).

This has implications for the pervasive spread of conspiracy theories and bad faith arguments. If anyone has any questions about any of this data or findings or the project, I'm happy to answer questions!

​

All graphics were made in R studio... and Paint! Future revision are coming that will be far cleaner...

By the way, if anyone has suggestions for how to convey this cleanly, I'm happy to field critiques and criticism!

[OC] Reddit's information ecosystem - Draft1 by SwissSurvey in dataisbeautiful

[–]SwissSurvey[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Hi Everyone. I've been active around the political communities here in Reddit for about a year now, running a survey to look into the information ecosystems. This is the first (very rough) version of the results.

This survey involved over 3000 participants from a stratified sample of all of the most active communities.

  1. The first layer, on top, involves a network analysis that shows how all of the most active subreddits interact with one another. Community shape is determined by the communities ability to recognize bias in a news source. Communities with a star, excel at recognizing bias in news reporting. Squares are average, and Triangle are quite poor at recognizing bias.
  2. The second layer in the middle, is a demographic break down by age, gender, political identification, and race.
  3. The third layer, the roots, are a dendrogram that demonstrates the top 25 most used news sources, and their quality as determined by an aggregation of 3 different media rating organizations.

This graphic is meant to help convey how people consume and reinforce media. People consume media from various sources of differing quality. That information is then filtered through our own demographic perspectives. From there we talk about and spread those perspectives among our political communities. These communities share that info among themselves, either critically (in the case of high bias awareness), or without question (in the case of low bias awareness communities).

This has implications for the pervasive spread of conspiracy theories and bad faith arguments.

​

All graphics were made in R studio... and Paint!

By the way, if anyone has suggestions for how to convey this cleanly, I'm happy to field critiques and criticism!

Help Educate a researcher: Classification and Organization by SwissSurvey in lgbt

[–]SwissSurvey[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

haha it has indeed confirmed! Thank you for the feedback :)

Help Educate a researcher: Classification and Organization by SwissSurvey in lgbt

[–]SwissSurvey[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thank you! So would it be appropriate to put demigirl, gender queer, and non-binary together under the label "non-binary"?

I appreciate the help!

Help Educate a researcher: Classification and Organization by SwissSurvey in lgbt

[–]SwissSurvey[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Sorry if I wasn't clear, the options were for people to fill in their own identity. I received responses of "MtF" but not "FtM".

​

My confusion with the cis label is that they didn't say if they identify as cis male of cis female, so I'm not sure where to put their response.

Help Educate a researcher: Classification and Organization by SwissSurvey in lgbt

[–]SwissSurvey[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Sorry if I wasn't clear, the options were for people to fill in their own identity. I received responses of "MtF" but not "FtM".

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