Sub-Standards and Mal-Practices: Misinformation's Role in Insular, Polarized, and Toxic Interactions on Reddit

TL;DR

It is shown that comments on articles from unreliable news websites are posted more often in right-leaning subreddits and that, within individual subreddits, comments are on average 32% relatively more likely to be toxic compared with comments on reliable news articles.

Abstract

In this work, we examine the influence of unreliable information on political incivility and toxicity on the social media platform Reddit. We show that comments on articles from unreliable news websites are posted more often in right-leaning subreddits and that within individual subreddits, comments, on average, are 32% more likely to be toxic compared to comments on reliable news articles. Using a regression model, we show that these results hold after accounting for partisanship and baseline toxicity rates within individual subreddits. Utilizing a zero-inflated negative binomial regression, we further show that as the toxicity of subreddits increases, users are more likely to comment on posts from known unreliable websites. Finally, modeling user interactions with an exponential random graph model, we show that when reacting to a Reddit submission that links to a website known for spreading unreliable information, users are more likely to be toxic to users of different political beliefs. Our results collectively illustrate that low-quality/unreliable information not only predicts increased toxicity but also polarizing interactions between users of different political orientations.

Figures (4)

• Figure 1: Subreddit political partisanship and politicalness distribution --- We determine the political partisanship (where a subreddit falls on the US left/right political spectrum) and how political a subreddit is by utilizing Waller et al.'s waller2021quantifying method for creating subreddit and user embeddings using an extension of Word2Vec kumar2018community.
• Figure 2: Subreddit and User Toxicity scores---We determine the toxicity norms for subreddits with at least 100 comments and for users with at least 5 comments. Each user and subreddit has distinctive toxicity norms, posting toxic comments at different rates. At a threshold of 0.80, most users and the subreddit's usual comments/posts are not considered toxic by the Perspective API SEVERE_TOXICITY classifier.
• Figure 3: Younger accounts are much more likely to submit and comment on unreliable website submissions.
• Figure 4: Percentage of interactions that are toxic in all, unreliable, reliable website submissions for Right and left-leaning authors against Right and left-leaning targets.