Community Changes on /r/hongkong during the Umbrella Protests

And we’ve reached the final day at AoIR 2023, and the session on networks that I’m in starts with Dmitry Kuznetsov, whose interest is in the community practices found in /r/hongkong during the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. These reacted against the gradual takeover by the People’s Republic of China, and were a transformative time for Hong Kong – but it is important to avoid a feel-good interpretation of these protests.

The protests shared time, place, and distinctive interactions, but on Reddit also unfolded in very platform-specific, bounded ways, in part because of the specific mixed Web 1.0/Web2.0 affordances of the platform. This is further affected by exogenous effects as large numbers of new users enter subreddits as external events take place; these don’t necessarily understand the context of the subreddit, or the rules of Reddit itself, and require further moderation and other means.

But the media event of the protests was external both to /r/hongkong and to Reddit itself; they produced an emergent public not in the way that hashtags on Twitter facilitate these but in the bounded and more persistent space of /r/hongkong – which provides a shared place but not necessarily shared time or distinct interactions. What happens to this shared space over time – do things go back to ‘normal’ at the end of the protests?

The project used then PushShift API to collect comments from the subreddit from 2018 to 2022, which produced some 1 million comments from 75,000 threads (only 3% of which were in Chinese characters). There was a massive influx of threads, and users posting them, during the late-2019 protests, during which time there were also substantially more link posts and content upvotes. After the protests, though, volumes of activity return to more or less normal limits; yet in the aftermath some key users became a great deal more central to the community – they contributed a greater proportion of all posts.

From Q2/2019, the discussion shifts from general Hong Kong topics (mainly by foreigners in the city), the discussion shifts first towards the protests and then towards the broader social-political issues in Hong Kong; topic modelling using BERT shows this shift very clearly. This continues even through the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. From 2021 there is also a politicisation of COVID-19 discussions through a Hong Kong lens, for instance with respect to taking the Chinese-produced Sinovac vaccine. Only in 2022 there is a return to more general topics, but a strong political undercurrent remains.

Community rules also evolve. From barely any rules there is a shift towards a greater imposition of moderation rules on the community, and a demarcation from other, more China-friendly Hong Kong subreddits; posts related to the protests are also made sticky for greater visibility during the protest period.