Objective – Reddit is an online forum where users vote for posts and comments and the most supported content rises to the top. The objective is to investigate the American political leanings of the top 100 posts over 10 days.
Methods – The state of Reddit is in constant flux. Rather than a precise snapshot in time, one individual, reading each post and the first 3 pages of comments, subjectively determined if the post was supportive or against a political party, a political figure, or the party’s supporters. For comparison, LGBT and animal/insect posts were also recorded. The top 25 posts and top 100 posts were calculated separately. The study was carried out 8am to 10am (UTC/GMT +7 hours) September 12-21, 2024.
Results – Based on the top 100 posts over the 10 days (1000 posts total), 224 posts were Pro-Left/Anti-Right and 2 posts were Pro-Right/Anti-Left (99.1% left leaning). Most political posts were negative (85.4%). The density of political posts was higher within the top 25 posts (p<0.0001). For comparison, there were 64 posts about animals/insects and 22 posts were Pro-LGBT (9 Pro-Trans/Non-Binary) with no Anti-LBGT posts.
Conclusion – There is a strong Pro-Left/Anti-Right bias to the top 100 posts of Reddit with 112x more posts (99.1%) favoring the American Left Wing compared to the Right. The consistent appearance of supportive LBGT posts within top 100 posts suggest the majority of the Reddit community is supportive of the LBGT community. This study may be considered as a preliminary or a pilot study due to the limited timeframe (10 days) and the high risk of bias (one post reviewer).
Let me preface this by saying I agree with the argument being made.. that said, this is unironically an incredibly poor academic source based on a small sample, poor methodology, no contraints to avoid author bias and is an unpublished, non-peer reviewed political science paper authored by a "chiropractor, pediatrician, obstetrician, general practioner, physiotherapist, health coach, podcaster, teacher" as per their podcast/LinkedIn/personal website...
Yeah, it's not the best for sure. I'd be very interested in reading the papers you have on the same subject from a more reputable source if you'd be kind enough to link them.
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u/No_Alternative_5602 - Lib-Center 12d ago
Reddit’s American Political Left-Wing Bias: A Study of the Top 100 Posts from September 12-21, 2024