Quantifying Social Organization and Political Polarization in Online Platforms

Using neural embeddings over 5.1 billion comments across 10,000 communities and 14 years of Reddit, the authors map communities along social dimensions (age, gender, US political partisanship) and show Reddit underwent a sharp political-polarization event around the 2016 US presidential election. A large-scale, Nature-published measurement of how the platform's community structure sorted and polarized.