We looked at how popular the Leaders’ Debates Commission’s themes were in Reddit post titles. This is what we found.
The 2016 American Federal Election was a defining moment for political campaign advertising on social media. A lot of the discussion around the American election focused on how platforms such as Twitter and Facebook played a role in political conversation.
Where does Canada stand in political discussions on social media? And what other platforms are being used to facilitate these conversations?
Our research team at uOttawa dove deeper into what users were saying about Canadian politics on a social media site that is less commonly used: Reddit.
An online social media platform launched in 2005, Reddit is made up of open communities and discussion forums. Most people on Reddit are adults between the ages of 25–29 who share content about a variety of topics.
Why Reddit?
A lot of the research on social media focuses more on platforms like Facebook and Twitter, so Reddit doesn’t get as much attention from researchers. The studies that do focus on Reddit tend to be more about American politics. There is some research on Reddit and Canadian topics, but those studies either say that there needs to be more research on Reddit or don’t dive very deep into the data they have from the platform.
Here’s How We Did It
We decided to look at one of Canada’s largest political events, the 2019 English Federal Leaders Debate. We wanted to find out if Reddit users were talking about any of the themes from the debate. The Leaders’ Debates Commission chose 5 themes that were submitted through CBC:
- Leadership in Canada and the World,
- Polarization, Human Rights and Immigration
- Indigenous Issues
- Affordability and Income Security
- Environment and Energy
These debate themes are a great way to tell us about the concerns of the public and lead to more engagement in elections. We narrowed our search to the three most popular communities on Reddit related to Canadian politics:
Note: The data that we used was from the Digital Ecosystem Research Challenge. It was collected in 2019.
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While looking through the available data sets, we discovered that there wasn’t a lot of research about popularity on Reddit. The existing studies that we found were mostly focused on Twitter. They told us that popularity on social media can affect how we vote. Political candidates can also use it to influence their Twitter followers. Our definition of popularity involved how much a post or theme was seen, or how visible it was. Did it get a lot of attention and did people engage with it?
Process
Our plan for assessing the data involved using Excel as a stepping stone to understanding what we can learn about the data.
We also decided to filter the 16,704 posts in our dataset. We sorted them by date range leading up to the election and number of comments. Then we narrowed our search into 3 months: August, September, and October. This helped us see how our themes changed in popularity over time.
Once our subreddits were selected and sampled, there were a total of 936 rows of data across the three subreddits from August to October (10% from each month). In total, 936 rows represent a 10% sample from each subreddit.
From there, we chose to focus on post titles. We used content analysis to sort post titles by debate theme.
A large part of our analysis involved giving each post a popularity score, shown below.
Adding both metrics allowed us to assign a score per user to address the difference in subreddit populations and get a better understanding of what was truly popular, relative to the population of each measured subreddit.
Using this score lets us address the difference in the amount of users in each subreddit (Ex. r/Canada has almost 1 million users, while r/CanadaPolitics has almost 150 000). This score gives us a clearer view on what was popular during the election.
Why use the sum comment score and not the total score for the post itself?
We can’t get that data because of what we were able to get from Reddit. We found a study that shows that we can use the comment score because the amount of comments on a post and the upvote score are related. If one rises, the other also rises.
Results
Did users discuss the English debate more before or after the debate, or was there no change?
We found that the debate was directly mentioned in 5 post titles:
The English Federal Leaders Debate was mentioned the most in October, either on or after the day of the debate. Still, since the number of posts we looked at was small, we cannot draw a meaningful conclusion from these results. We would have to look at all of the posts in this timeframe to get a better picture.
Did posters on Reddit talk more about the five debate themes from the 2019 English federal leaders debate before or after the debate, or was there no change?
There was an increase in how often the debate themes were talked about on Reddit. Most of the post titles related to the themes increased in October, except for Energy and the Environment and Indigenous Issues. It’s likely that posts related to the debate themes would increase during election season.
Other Discoveries
Overall we noticed that October saw the most election-related engagement on all three subreddits. Here are some other findings that we found in each subreddit:
r/Canada
- The most popular issue was Leadership in Canada and the world
- The second was Polarization, Human Rights, and immigration
r/onguardforthee
- The most popular issue was Leadership in Canada and the World
- The second was Polarization, Human Rights, and immigration
r/canadapolitics
- Leadership in Canada and the World
- The second was Environment and Energy
Ranking for the most popular themes (in order):
- Leadership in Canada and the World.
2. Environment and Energy.
3. Affordability and Income Security
4. Polarization, Human Rights and Immigration
5. Indigenous Issues
(Wanna see other graphs? Click here to view our reddit post on them!)
Limitations
The main limit in our research was the amount of data we could analyze in a short period of time. We had to shrink our sample size in order to accommodate for the time we had.
In addition, due to Reddit’s API, we were not able to access the posts themselves, which includes any full articles or visual content that was posted. Our focus was on the titles; we assumed that the topics were clearly highlighted.
Furthermore, we did not have access to tools that would have provided further insight, leaving Excel as our best option to analyze our data.
Analysis Experience
While Excel might be a standard tool for data analysis, it was helpful for looking at our samples. Our team used the same Excel templates that were similar to the data that we first collected. This helped us create a very simple dataset that we could analyze in the time we had.
Overall, Excel allowed us to stay on the same page while we were analyzing the data, especially when it came to our different experience levels.
Recommendations and The Future
Echoing the studies we found, we agree that more research into Reddit must be done, especially considering how engaged its users can become in various topics, including politics. Based on our findings, further research is needed into this subject; we can’t generalize the results, especially since our sample size was so small. We recommend more studies on Reddit with larger sample sizes to increase understanding of the platform and our topic.
It was interesting to see which topics Canadians were concerned about during the federal election campaign.his kind of research can be a good way to show us what matters most to Canadians during elections.
The research should also dive deeper into the content and comments that were posted on the subreddits, in order to get a better understanding of how popularity on Reddit can affect elections.
You can find our full reference list here.
TL;DR
Did posters on Reddit talk more about the Maclean’s (2019) five debate themes from the 2019 English federal leaders debate before or after the debate, or was there no change?
Discussion of the debate themes increased in October and stayed at relatively the same level in August and September
Was the English federal leaders' debate itself being talked about among posters on Reddit?
The debate was mentioned a total of 5 times in our data.
