2025/10/31 by Daniele Cirulli, Cirulli, Daniele, Antonio Desiderio +5 · 1 voice
Physics and Astronomy · Social Sciences · #Misinformation and Its Impacts #Opinion Dynamics and Social Influence #Social Media and Politics #cs.SI #physics.soc-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2510.27467
openalex publication_date 2025/10/31 · openalex created_date 2025/11/05 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Political debate nowadays takes place mainly on online social media, with election periods amplifying ideological engagement. Reddit is generally considered more resistant to polarization and echo chamber effects than platforms like Twitter or Facebook. Here, we challenge this assumption through a case study across the 2016 US presidential election. We use statistical validation techniques to extract ideologically distinct communities of subreddits, in terms of their contributing user base and news consumption, which we use to analyze the dynamics of political debate. We thus reveal clear polarization in both interaction-based and topic-based communities, with clusters of Democratic, Conservative, and Banned subreddits. Election periods intensify cross-group engagement, align Banned and Conservative content, and reduce linguistic diversity within groups. Overall we characterize Reddit as a polarized environment marked by the presence of echo chambers, highlighting network validation as a key method for identifying behavioral and interaction patterns on online social media.