The Evolution of Language in Social Media Comments
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arXiv
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2024
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| author | Di Marco, Niccolò Loru, Edoardo Bonetti, Anita Serra, Alessandra Olga Grazia Cinelli, Matteo Quattrociocchi, Walter |
| author_facet | Di Marco, Niccolò Loru, Edoardo Bonetti, Anita Serra, Alessandra Olga Grazia Cinelli, Matteo Quattrociocchi, Walter |
| contents | Understanding the impact of digital platforms on user behavior presents foundational challenges, including issues related to polarization, misinformation dynamics, and variation in news consumption. Comparative analyses across platforms and over different years can provide critical insights into these phenomena. This study investigates the linguistic characteristics of user comments over 34 years, focusing on their complexity and temporal shifts. Utilizing a dataset of approximately 300 million English comments from eight diverse platforms and topics, we examine the vocabulary size and linguistic richness of user communications and their evolution over time. Our findings reveal consistent patterns of complexity across social media platforms and topics, characterized by a nearly universal reduction in text length, diminished lexical richness, but decreased repetitiveness. Despite these trends, users consistently introduce new words into their comments at a nearly constant rate. This analysis underscores that platforms only partially influence the complexity of user comments. Instead, it reflects a broader, universal pattern of human behaviour, suggesting intrinsic linguistic tendencies of users when interacting online. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_11450 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2024 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | The Evolution of Language in Social Media Comments Di Marco, Niccolò Loru, Edoardo Bonetti, Anita Serra, Alessandra Olga Grazia Cinelli, Matteo Quattrociocchi, Walter Physics and Society Computers and Society Social and Information Networks Understanding the impact of digital platforms on user behavior presents foundational challenges, including issues related to polarization, misinformation dynamics, and variation in news consumption. Comparative analyses across platforms and over different years can provide critical insights into these phenomena. This study investigates the linguistic characteristics of user comments over 34 years, focusing on their complexity and temporal shifts. Utilizing a dataset of approximately 300 million English comments from eight diverse platforms and topics, we examine the vocabulary size and linguistic richness of user communications and their evolution over time. Our findings reveal consistent patterns of complexity across social media platforms and topics, characterized by a nearly universal reduction in text length, diminished lexical richness, but decreased repetitiveness. Despite these trends, users consistently introduce new words into their comments at a nearly constant rate. This analysis underscores that platforms only partially influence the complexity of user comments. Instead, it reflects a broader, universal pattern of human behaviour, suggesting intrinsic linguistic tendencies of users when interacting online. |
| title | The Evolution of Language in Social Media Comments |
| topic | Physics and Society Computers and Society Social and Information Networks |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.11450 |