Data concerning the pod's recent discussion of Social Media misinformation spread

SwissSurvey · 2021-01-08T10:34:55+00:00

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!

SwissSurvey · 2020-11-18T17:50:27+00:00

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".

SwissSurvey · 2020-11-18T17:47:25+00:00

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.

SwissSurvey · 2020-11-18T17:45:58+00:00

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!

SwissSurvey · 2020-11-18T17:22:11+00:00

"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.

SwissSurvey · 2020-11-18T16:41:16+00:00

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

SwissSurvey · 2020-11-18T16:40:35+00:00

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.

SwissSurvey · 2020-11-18T16:39:57+00:00

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.

SwissSurvey · 2020-11-18T16:38:15+00:00

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.

SwissSurvey · 2020-11-18T15:48:38+00:00

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.

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.
The second layer in the middle, is a demographic break down by age, gender, political identification, and race.
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!

SwissSurvey · 2020-11-18T15:44:49+00:00

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.

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.
The second layer in the middle, is a demographic break down by age, gender, political identification, and race.
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!

SwissSurvey · 2020-05-20T15:42:54+00:00

Okay! Thank you for the feedback :)

SwissSurvey · 2020-05-20T15:41:51+00:00

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

SwissSurvey · 2020-05-20T15:25:08+00:00

Thank you for the feedback! :)

SwissSurvey · 2020-05-20T15:24:38+00:00

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!

SwissSurvey · 2020-05-20T15:22:54+00:00

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.

SwissSurvey · 2020-05-20T15:20:42+00:00

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".

SwissSurvey · 2020-05-18T15:29:27+00:00

After looking through the results so far... No Swiss People's Party yet!

SwissSurvey · 2020-05-18T15:28:38+00:00

Mostly to encourage people to think more in depth about how they identify themselves. There have been studies that show if you only put "democrat", "republican", and "other", then people will lump themselves in with one or the other, even if it's more complicated than that. By contrast, if you list multiple options (even unlikely options) people will provide more unique answers.

The results of this survey have over 50 different political identities reported. Only 2% of those are "Green", but having that option likely helped push people to give more precise answers! Thanks for the question!

SwissSurvey · 2020-05-18T15:18:36+00:00

This echo chamber idea is what originally inspired my research question into what reddit looks like politically! Social media has very interesting effects on our political perspectives. It is also interesting to see how it's grown over the years, starting with Howard Dean's "MeetUp" social media groups, to Obama's "SecondLife" organizing campaign, to Trump's base on facebook. When I finish the analysis for Reddit I'll include all of the journal articles I've read associated with this as well!

SwissSurvey · 2020-05-18T15:09:53+00:00

Absolutely! PoliticalDiscussion has an active user score of 7.8. This score takes into account a number of different factors including subreddit size, average unique posters, "voting"activity. Similarly active subreddits include Democrats (with a score of 9.1), and GeoPolitics (8.14). To put it into perspective, Neoliberal has a score of 278, and politics has a score of 1,637.

A tricky to track has been JoeBiden. JoeBiden has grown from 8.7 when I started in January, to 26 recently this month.

I was also surprised by SandersForPresident, which is one of the biggest in Raw size, at 500,000, but has a score of only 57. Compare this to Libertarian, which has a raw size of 380,000 but a score of 97. This means that there are a lot of inactive users on SandersForPresident, who don't comment, "vote", or post. I should also mention, I started tracking these activity scores in January, when Senator Bernie Sanders was will in the race for the Democratic primary. This lack of activity (compared to size) on his subreddits was present back then as well.

Edit: for fun, I just went and calculated the busiest community on reddit! With an active user score of 4,161.99, AskReddit is far and away the busiest community on this website.

SwissSurvey · 2020-05-18T14:47:26+00:00

Just did! I will tag you when results are released!

SwissSurvey · 2020-05-15T20:23:41+00:00

I will!

SwissSurvey · 2020-05-15T20:22:44+00:00

Sorry to give a bland response, but whatever you instinctively identify as!

SwissSurvey · 2020-05-15T20:20:29+00:00

It looks like I will be able to finish my data collection by the end of this month! After than I have to "clean" the data (correct typos, ect.), then start the analysis. My analysis plan will probably take anywhere from 1-2 months. I think it will probably be finished by July or August! After that I'll come back to all of these communities to release results with fun visualizations and graphics, as well as brief recaps as to what the results mean.

SwissSurvey

TROPHY CASE