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| Auteurs principaux: | , , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2026
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| Accès en ligne: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.07509 |
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| _version_ | 1866918378693722112 |
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| author | Rizoiu, Marian-Andrei Khuu, Duy Law, Andrew Largeron, Christine |
| author_facet | Rizoiu, Marian-Andrei Khuu, Duy Law, Andrew Largeron, Christine |
| contents | Political polarisation on structured discussion platforms such as Reddit differs fundamentally from that on broadcast platforms such as Twitter/X, yet most prior work targets the latter. We present an end-to-end framework for measuring and analysing polarisation dynamics, applied to the r/Brexit subreddit (871K submissions, November 2015 -- February 2021). We construct r/Brexit, a crowd-annotated stance dataset of 5,895 labelled submissions (inter-annotator agreement = 0.804), and train a domain-adapted BERT classifier. We introduce a continuous polarity metric that replaces discrete stance categories, revealing fine-grained opinion spectra across 27 politically-defined periods. Our analysis yields three key findings: (a) future stance prediction is confounded by survivorship bias: persuadable users disengage, and those who remain are already entrenched; (b) echo chambers are quantifiably dominant, with nearly 40% of interactions between like-minded users; (c) user current polarity is the dominant predictor of future polarity, with echo-chamber immersion as the secondary predictive signal. These findings reveal that Reddit's partisan core is entrenched by self-selection, not softened by cross-cutting exposure. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_07509 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Brexit Means Brexit: Selection Bias, Echo Chambers, and Entrenched Opinion on Reddit Rizoiu, Marian-Andrei Khuu, Duy Law, Andrew Largeron, Christine Computers and Society Social and Information Networks Political polarisation on structured discussion platforms such as Reddit differs fundamentally from that on broadcast platforms such as Twitter/X, yet most prior work targets the latter. We present an end-to-end framework for measuring and analysing polarisation dynamics, applied to the r/Brexit subreddit (871K submissions, November 2015 -- February 2021). We construct r/Brexit, a crowd-annotated stance dataset of 5,895 labelled submissions (inter-annotator agreement = 0.804), and train a domain-adapted BERT classifier. We introduce a continuous polarity metric that replaces discrete stance categories, revealing fine-grained opinion spectra across 27 politically-defined periods. Our analysis yields three key findings: (a) future stance prediction is confounded by survivorship bias: persuadable users disengage, and those who remain are already entrenched; (b) echo chambers are quantifiably dominant, with nearly 40% of interactions between like-minded users; (c) user current polarity is the dominant predictor of future polarity, with echo-chamber immersion as the secondary predictive signal. These findings reveal that Reddit's partisan core is entrenched by self-selection, not softened by cross-cutting exposure. |
| title | Brexit Means Brexit: Selection Bias, Echo Chambers, and Entrenched Opinion on Reddit |
| topic | Computers and Society Social and Information Networks |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.07509 |