Year: 2020
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: We study the emergence of support for Donald Trump in Reddit’s political discussion. With almost 800k subscribers, “r/The_Donald” is one of the largest communities on Reddit, and one of the main hubs for Trump supporters. It was created in 2015, shortly after Donald Trump began his presidential campaign. By using only data from 2012, we predict the likelihood of being a supporter of Donald Trump in 2016, the year of the last US presidential elections. To characterize the behavior of Trump supporters, we draw from three different sociological hypotheses: homophily, social influence, and social feedback. We operationalize each hypothesis as a set of features for each user, and train classifiers to predict their participation in r/The_Donald.
Authors: Joan Massachs, Corrado Monti, Gianmarco De Francisci Morales, Francesco Bonchi
Language: English
Topic: Social Media and Politics
Subfield: Communication
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W3023930752