Reddit, Mis/Disinformation Campaigns, and the 2022 US Midterm Elections

• In Event: Conspiracy Theories, Platforms, and Elections

Abstract

Mis/disinformation has been accelerating in digital spaces since 2016, and as we head into the US 2022 midterm elections, there is extensive concern that BIPOC will face targeted digital propaganda through coordinated online voter suppression campaigns. In the wake of Trump’s victory in 2016, it was found that Russian operatives stealthily seeded malign campaigns to disproportionately target African American communities in efforts to weaken group solidarity, confuse and distort the democratic process, and dampen voter turnout. Since 2020, the progression of mis/disinformation campaigns has moved beyond Russian IRA agents and Chinese foreign operatives to domestic campaigns disseminated by far-right populist groups like QAnon, the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. These campaigns, covert and overt, fed into the January 6, 2021 US Capitol insurrection. Insurgents, many white supremacists and armed citizen militia, were “Stop the Steal” adherents who believed the “Big Lie” that Biden stole the election due to voter fraud and voting irregularities emanating from a rigged mail-in voting system.

While attention has been focused on Facebook and Twitter for their role in spreading both “Stop the Steal” and other forms of mis/disinformation, other platforms have escaped scrutiny. One of these is Reddit, which while popular (21st most popular site globally; 7th most popular in the US) little is known about its role in perpetuating mis/disinformation. However, Reddit has long had a reputation as a breeding ground for toxic white male extremism, racism, and anti-feminism - all elements that make it welcoming for these types of campaigns. Reddit provides its pseudonymous users the freedom to subscribe to communities (subreddits) of interest organized around niche topics. Content visibility is based on the upvotes or downvotes of material by community members. And, Reddit’s reliance on a large, unpaid group of moderators to enforce the few rules governing conversations is unique among social media platforms. Unlike Facebook or Twitter which rely substantially on algorithmic tools and a large pool of contract labor to ensure the quality of their content, Reddit’s moderation is community-driven and mostly done by hand.

This study examines not only how mis/disinformation campaigns target communities of color, but also how mis/disinformation intersects with prevailing health, economic and political anxieties that now threaten the viability of US democracy. The COVID-19 pandemic has also fueled deadly disparities among communities of color historically discriminated against by the health care system, and Black and Latino populations continue to lag White populations in vaccination and booster shots. Widening partisan polarization on a variety of issues now fuel the toxic growth of white domestic terrorism, driven by the embrace of a far right populism that has made political violence more palatable. There is mounting fear that during the 2022 midterms, BIPOC will face intensive digital voter suppression campaigns capitalizing on these multiple public health and political fractures. Given Reddit’s unique position as both a space that has implicitly allowed far-right organizing and its unique content moderation approach, we believe it critical to understand how mis/disinformation campaigns are proliferating on the platform.

Therefore this study conducts a longitudinal analysis of content on Reddit across 2022 in an effort to investigate: 1. The prevalence of mis/disinformation across the platform’s most popular news and politics subreddits, 2. The actors, foreign and domestic, who seed this mis/disinformation, 3. The content of these campaigns, 4. Their target audience, and 5.What role Reddit’s unique content moderation system plays in facilitating (or reducing) mis/disinformation. This study’s literature is anchored in far-right populism, partisan polarization, and mis/disinformation and utilizes political communication theoretical frameworks of networked framing and networked gatekeeping. In this proposed year-long longitudinal study across 2022, the aforementioned questions will be investigated through sampling the top 20 posts as sampled weekly from the most subscribed subreddits dedicated to news and politics including: r/news, r/politics, r/worldnews. This study will utilize a mixed methodology of quantitative and qualitative approaches to analyze content. Quantitative approaches will utilize automated content analysis via NLP and social/semantic network analysis to identify mis/disinformation content, determine leading posters and their networks, and highlight leading frames of these campaigns. Multimodal discourse analysis of posts and comment streams (including images and memes) will enable deeper qualitative analysis of these mis/disinformation content signatures,, and interviews with subreddit moderators will provide additional detail into how community moderation systems afford or stymie mis/disinformation spread.

Authors

• Adrienne Massanari, American University

• Sharon Meraz, University of Illinois at Chicago