Self-Sorting into Radical Political Communities on Reddit

It’s Friday morning, and the warm glow of being at an in-person AoIR 2022 conference still hasn’t worn off yet. I’m starting with the session on radicalisation, and the first paper is by Diana Zulli and Marcus Mann. They’re interested in early-stage radicalisation, which has been studied in offline and online contexts for some time already. This involves the radicalisation of beliefs, but also social processes of connection, and both are motivated by the search for significance and the development of new social networks. But online radicalisation is also affected by the structure of online platforms, while there is very little evidence of ‘algorithmic determinism’ playing a role in pushing people towards radicalisation. The ‘echo chamber’ is a myth.

So what are the pathways towards radical communities online, then, and how is radicalisation in online communities perceived? The project approached this through interviews with 27 Redditors who participated in mainstream and fringe political communities on Reddit, during 2021. These were mainly white, male, college-educated, US residents, and a mix of Democrats, Republicans, and politically non-aligned participants.

Their engagement in radical online communities was promoted in part by deep disillusionment with offline politics, with mainstream media seen as too biased, polarised, entertainment-focussed, or sensationalised, and offline conversations about politics with friends seen as unsatisfactory and superficial. Second, they were then also incidentally exposed to political discussion on Reddit when they were actually on the platform for other reasons: they received recommendations about political Subreddits, and gradually drifted towards more radical Subreddits which were mentioned on other discussion groups on the platform. Reddit then became a space for more earnest and political discussions for them.

The participants then saw Reddit as a radical political space, but felt themselves to be unaffected by such radicalism; they felt that they could see through such radicalisation, and even saw it as a civic duty to participate in such radical communities in order to deradicalise others.

Political sorting literature may explain some of these developments. This literature suggests that parties are getting more extreme because people are getting better at sorting themselves into the parties where they feel at home; people themselves thus aren’t getting more extreme, but just position themselves more clearly. The same may be happening on Reddit: in response to their frustration with the highly sorted offline political landscape, people are actively seeking spaces where their political beliefs fit in, and connect with the communities gathered there; in these spaces they can perform their non-party-aligned, highly unsorted political identity. But this may also lead to further radicalisation, as it enables people to engage more fully with fringe groups online and offline.

This ‘unsorted politics’ that is disconnected from more stable party identities may thus also be a mechanism of heightened susceptibility to radicalisation, and also promotes engagement with other unsorted, fringe media content.