Tl;dr: have there been any writings, surveys, or studies on the political composition of Reddit shifting in large communities?


I logged out of my reddit account a while ago but still browse some subreddits without logging in and have recently noticed more far-right rhetoric in general. I’m curious to know if others have seen this trend or, even better, wrote about it or documented it. Some examples I noticed were r/sweden and r/exmuslim. These are two communities I used to frequent often and both of them now have descended into more upvoted far-right rhetoric of the “deport them all!” caliber.

I have a feeling (from my own experience browsing these communities) that such content used to be quickly addressed and downvoted, and both of those subreddits don’t tend to ban people on the fly nor overmoderate. Sometimes I see threads with the same title (likely posted by the same person) on both the subreddit and the corresponding lemmy community where the difference in opinion and the general political leaning is obvious.

So, not to succumb to my own biases, have there been any writings, surveys, or studies on the political composition of Reddit shifting in large communities?

  • Throwaway
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    1 year ago

    I just went on reddits /all for the first time in months.

    It looks about the same to me.

    • ???@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 year ago

      Unfortunately eyeballing it is never enough. Now with scraping reddit becoming more problematic, how could we measure such changes?

      • Throwaway
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        1 year ago

        You really can’t, not objectively at least, even if you had access. Especially when the “paradox of tolerence” comes into play, like with muslims.