Incivility in Reddit’s Top Political and News Subreddits: Prevalence, Moderation, and Engagement

Social media communities are commonly used as marketing tools to reach millions of users. Through two studies, we investigate how owned social media content is associated with commercial performance and moderated by community size. We find that commercial performance is positively associated with posts showcasing the superior value of a product or brand and with posts that have an intention to sell. In addition, in large online communities, posts intended to create social interactions among marketers and users are not associated with commercial performance. However, in mid-sized communities, posts with the same intentions increase commercial performance. We theorise that the presence of internet trolls and a lower sense of group loyalty may explain the absence of these associations in large online communities. Finally, we identify four dimensions of content that were fairly consistent across studies. We customise these content dimensions according to each of the industries studied for marketers’ use.

Introduction Daffodil Day, usually held in spring, raises funds for cancer awareness and research using this symbol of hope. On that day, people who donate money to this good cause are usually given a yellow daffodil pin to wear. When I lived in Auckland, New Zealand, on the last Friday in August most people walking around the city centre proudly wore a cheerful yellow flower. So many people generously participated in this initiative that one almost felt obliged to join the cause in order to wear the ‘uniform’ – the daffodil pin – as everyone else did on that day. To donate and to wear a daffodil is the social expectation, and operating in social environment people often endeavour to meet the expectation by doing the ‘appropriate things’ defined by societies or communities. After all, who does not like to receive a beam of acceptance and appreciation from a fellow daffodil bearer in Auckland’s Queen Street? States in international society are no different. In some ways, states wear ‘uniforms’ while executing domestic and foreign affairs just as human beings do within their social groups. States develop the understandings of desirable behaviour from the international community with which they interact and identify. They are ‘socialised’ to act in line with the expectations of international community. These expectations are expressed in the form of international norms, a prescriptive set of ideas about the ‘appropriate behaviour for actors with a given identity’ (Finnemore and Sikkink 891). Motivated by this logic of appropriateness, states that comply with certain international norms in world politics justify and undertake actions that are considered appropriate for their identities. This essay starts with examining how international norms can be spread to different countries through the process of ‘state socialisation’ (how the countries are ‘talked into’ wearing the ‘uniform’). Second, the essay investigates the idea of ‘cultural match’: how domestic actors comply with an international norm by interpreting and manipulating it according to their local political and legal practices (how the countries wear the ‘uniform’ differently). Lastly, the essay probes the current international normative community and the liberal values embedded in major international norms (whether states would continue wearing the ‘uniform’). International Norms and State Socialisation: Why Do States Wear the ‘Uniforms’? Norm diffusion is related to the efforts of ‘norm entrepreneurs’ using various platforms to convince a critical mass of states to embrace new norms (Finnemore and Sikkink 895-896). Early studies of norm diffusion tend to emphasise nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) as norm entrepreneurs and advocates, such as Oxfam and its goal of reducing poverty and hunger worldwide (Capie 638). In other empirical research, intergovernmental organisations (IGOs) were shown to serve as ‘norm teachers,’ such as UNESCO educating developing countries the value of science policy organisations (Finnemore 581-586). Additionally, states and other international actors can also play important roles in norm diffusion. Powerful states with more communication resources sometimes enjoy advantages in creating and promoting new norms (Florini 375). For example, the United States and Western European countries have often been considered as the major proponents of free trade. Norm emergence and state socialisation in a normative community often occurs during critical historical periods, such as wars and major economic downturns, when international changes and domestic crises often coincide with each other (Ikenberry and Kupchan 292). For instance, the norm entrepreneurs of ‘responsible power/state’ can be traced back to the great powers (mainly the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union) and their management of international order at the end of WWII (see Bull). With their negotiations and series of international agreements at the Cairo, Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam Conference in the 1940s, these great powers established a post-World War international society based on the key liberal values of international peace and security, free trade, human rights, and democracy. Human beings are not born to know what appropriate behaviour is; we learn social norms from parents, schools, peers, and other community members. International norms are collective expectations and understanding of how state governments should approach their domestic and foreign affairs. States ‘learn’ international norms while socialising with a normative community. From a sociological perspective, socialisation summarises ‘how and to what extent diverse individuals are meshed with the requirement of collective life’ at the societal level (Long and Hadden 39). It mainly consists of the process of training and shaping newcomers by the group members and the social adjustment of novices to the normative framework and the logic of appropriateness (Long and Hadden 39). Similarly, social psychology defines socialisation as the process in which ‘social organisations influence the action and experience of individuals’ (Gold and Douvan 145). Inspired by sociology and psychology, political scientists consider socialisation to be the mechanism through which norm entrepreneurs persuade other actors (usually a norm novice) to adhere to a particular prescriptive standard (Johnston, “Social State” 16). Norm entrepreneurs can change novices’ behaviour by the methods of persuasion and social influence (Johnston, “Treating International Institutions” 496-506). Socialisation sometimes demands that individual actors should comply with organisational norms by changing their interests or preferences (persuasion). Norm entrepreneurs often attempt to construct an appealing cognitive frame in order to persuade the novices (either individuals or states) to change their normative preferences or adopt new norms. They tend to use language that can ‘name, interpret and dramatise’ the issues related to the emerging norm (Finnemore and Sikkink 987). As a main persuasive device, ‘framing’ can provide a singular interpretation and appropriate behavioural response for a particular situation (Payne 39). Cognitive consistency theory found in psychology has suggested the mechanism of ‘analogy’, which indicates that actors are more likely to accept new ideas that share some similarities to the extant belief or ideas that they have already accepted (see Hybel, ch. 2). Based on this understanding, norm entrepreneurs usually frame issues in a way that can associate and resonate with the shared value of the targeted novices (Payne 43). For example, Finnemore’s research shows that when it promoted the creation of state science bureaucracies in the 1960s, UNESCO associated professional science policy-making with the appropriate role of a modern state, which was well received by the post-war developing countries in Latin America, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia (Finnemore 565-597). Socialisation can also emanate actors’ pro-norm behaviour through a cost-benefit calculation made with social rewards and punishments (social influence). A normative community can use the mechanism of back-patting and opprobrium to distribute social reward and punishment. Back-patting – ‘recognition, praise and normative support’ – is offered for a novice’s or member’s cooperative and pro-norm behaviour (Johnston, “Treating International Institutions” 503). In contrast, opprobrium associated with status denial and identity rejection can create social and psychological costs (Johnston 504). Both the reward and punishment grow in intensity with the number of co-operators (Johnston 504). A larger community can often create more criticism towards rule-breakers, and thus greatly increase the cost of disobedience. For instance, the lack of full commitment from major powers, such as China, the United States, and some other OECD countries, has arguably made global collective action towards mitigating climate change more difficult, as the cost of non-compliance is relatively low. While being in a normative environment, novice or emerging states that have not yet been socialised into the international community can respond to persuasion and social influence through the processes of identification and mimicking. Social psychology indicates that when one actor accepts persuasion or social influence based on its desire to build or maintain a ‘satisfying self-defining relationship’ to another actor, the mechanism of identification starts to work (Kelman 53). Identification among a social group can generate ‘obligatory’ behaviour, where individual states make decisions by attempting to match their perceptions of ‘who they are’ (national identity) with the expectation of the normative community (Glodgeier and Tetlock 82). After identifying with the normative community, a novice state would then mimic peer states’ pro-norm behaviour in order to be considered as a qualified member of the social group. For example, when the Chinese government was deliberating over its ratification of the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety in 2003, a Ministry of Environmental Protection brief noted that China should ratify the Protocol as soon as possible because China had always been a country ‘keeping its word’ in international society, and non-ratification would largely ‘undermine China’s international image and reputation’ (Ministry of Environmental Protection of PRC). Despite the domestic industry’s disagreement with entering into the Protocol, the Chinese government’s self-identification as a ‘responsible state’ that performs its international promises and duties played an important role in China’s adoption of the international norm of biosafety. Domestic Salience of International Norms: How Do States Wear the ‘Uniforms’ Differently? Individual states do not accept international norms passively; instead, state governments often negotiate and interact with domestic a

Social media platforms like TikTok have become central to how contemporary cultures express fear and anxiety, making them vital sites for studying how digital dread takes shape. This study examines how horror narratives and surveillance themes operate within TikTok’s compressed temporal format and algorithmic attention economy. Through quantitative content analysis of 19,382 TikTok videos, we investigate the prevalence, engagement patterns, and aesthetic characteristics of horror- and surveillance-themed content on the platform. Our findings reveal that horror-themed content, while constituting only 1.01% of videos, generates disproportionately higher engagement across all metrics compared to platform averages, with 7.9% more likes and 13.5% more comments. The brevity of TikTok videos (average 32.42 seconds) creates a distinctive “compressed horror aesthetic” that differs significantly from traditional horror media, relying on immediate affective triggers rather than sustained narrative development. We analyze these dynamics through Affective Disposition Theory (ADT), which explains how audience emotional alignment with characters and scenarios shapes enjoyment and engagement, even in short-form narratives. Using surveillance-themed content as a comparative baseline, we show how different forms of digital anxiety manifest through distinct engagement mechanisms. This research contributes to our understanding of how platform affordances influence genre-specific content creation and consumption, with implications for media literacy, platform governance, and digital wellbeing in ecosystems increasingly dominated by short-form video content.

We present two studies of online ephemerality and anonymity based on the popular discussion board /b/ at 4chan.org: a website with over 7 million users that plays an influential role in Internet culture. Although researchers and practitioners often assume that user identity and data permanence are central tools in the design of online communities, we explore how /b/ succeeds despite being almost entirely anonymous and extremely ephemeral. We begin by describing /b/ and performing a content analysis that suggests the community is dominated by playful exchanges of images and links. Our first study uses a large dataset of more than five million posts to quantify ephemerality in /b/. We find that most threads spend just five seconds on the first page and less than five minutes on the site before expiring. Our second study is an analysis of identity signals on 4chan, finding that over 90% of posts are made by fully anonymous users, with other identity signals adopted and discarded at will. We describe alternative mechanisms that /b/ participants use to establish status and frame their interactions.

Web 2.0 platforms (internet-based platforms enabling rich content, commenting, and sharing) have only recently been examined for their contributions to sport coach learning. Previous research with educators has shown varied patterns of access and engagement with these platforms for professional purposes, often associated with demographic and professional characteristics of the users. More knowledge of sport coach engagement with Web 2.0 platforms would increase understanding of these platforms’ affordances and limitations for coach learning and development. Using a survey of 715 U.S. swimming coaches, this study examined the frequency of accessing seven Web 2.0 platforms for coaching information, platform-specific engagement behaviours, and the predictive relationships of coach demographics and job characteristics on these behaviours. Descriptive analysis showed YouTube to have the highest and most universal frequency of access. Two platforms (Twitter and SwimSwam) showed greater access by male coaches. Viewing content was much more frequent than sharing or commenting across most platforms. Canonical correlation analyses yielded three distinct functions showing that coach gender and job characteristics were associated with platform choice and engagement behaviours. These findings resonate with nascent research on coaches and established research on educators.

This study examines how cultural heritage institutions utilize Google Arts & Culture (GA&C), a Google initiative that provides a publishing platform for institutions to showcase their collections and engage with users. Based on semistructured interviews with 23 cultural institutions and one Google employee, the study provides an empirical account of platform adoption beyond dominant commercial and social media contexts. Theoretically, it contributes to platform studies by analyzing how platformization unfolds in the cultural sector, where traditionally public institutions engage with external platforms under varying organizational constraints. Methodologically, it offers a situated perspective on how institutions make sense of platform governance, digital strategy, and content production in everyday practice. Findings reveal persistent challenges in aligning institutional needs with platform affordances. While institutions were drawn to GA&C's promise of greater visibility, infrastructural support, and storytelling tools, these benefits were often undermined by limited technical resources, communication breakdowns, and logistical hurdles. Internal dynamics, from institutional memory to internal collaboration, proved to be the most significant factor shaping institutional participation, leading to fragmented and short-lived use of the platform. The kind of infrastructural alignment central to platformization never fully materialized. As a result, GA&C remained a peripheral tool rather than an integrated component of institutional digital strategies, highlighting the contingent, partial, and often fragile nature of platform adoption in the cultural sector.

With increasing participation in social media and online communities, content moderation has become an important part of the online experience. Since of beginning of these digital platforms, volunteer moderators have been the essential workforce for platform governance. However, human moderation suffers from a limited capacity in moderating massive and undesirable content. Recently, many online platforms and communities have started to adopt algorithm-based moderation tools (bot moderators) to enable machine-powered platform governance to cope with the increasing need for content moderation. As platforms move toward the technical and automated mode of governance, there is a growing concern over de-humanization and whether machines would lead volunteer moderators to reduce their contributions. To understand the role of these increasingly popular bot moderators, we conduct an empirical study to examine the impact of machine-powered regulations on volunteer moderators’ behaviors. With data collected from 156 subreddits on Reddit, a large global online community, we found that delegating moderation to machines augments volunteer moderators’ role as community managers. Human moderators engage in more moderation-related activities, including 20.2% more corrective and 14.9% supportive activities with their community members. Importantly, the effect manifests primarily among communities with large user bases and detailed guidelines, suggesting that community needs for moderation are the key factors driving more voluntary contributions in the presence of bot moderators.

Introduction This integrative thematic review synthesizes the body of peer-reviewed studies on political communication via Twitter/X, aiming to map the conceptual and methodological landscape of the field as indexed in major databases from the platform’s inception in 2009 through 2024. Methods The review followed a PRISMA-style workflow for search, de-duplication, and screening, resulting in a final corpus of 52 articles from the Web of Science Core Collection and Scopus. Included studies were analyzed using a hybrid deductive-inductive thematic analysis. Results Findings are organized around five central themes: (1) actor strategy (personalization, timing, campaign orchestration), (2) audience behavior (engagement patterns, selective exposure), (3) platform architecture (affordances, algorithmic mediation), (4) trust and legitimacy (institutional credibility vs. visibility logics), and (5) methodological innovation (computational scaling vs. interpretive depth). The analysis reveals conceptual consolidation but also a structural imbalance in the field, characterized by the dominance of US and EU scholarship, limited cross-regional integration, and uneven theoretical convergence. Discussion The study argues for three key developments in future research: the adoption of mixed-method designs integrating discourse, network, and behavioral data; greater attention to non-Western contexts; and the explicit treatment of platforms as political actors, not just communication stages. Limitations include the restriction to two databases and a specific timeframe, the absence of a formal quality appraisal, and evolving platform conditions that challenge reproducibility. This review provides a roadmap for building more cumulative, comparative, and theory-driven research on the intersection of Twitter/X and governance.

BackgroundFamily planning has significant health and social benefits, but in settings like Uganda, is underutilized due to prevalent community and religious norms promoting large family size and gender inequity. Family Health = Family Wealth (FH = FW) is a multi-level, community-based intervention that used community dialogues grounded in Campbell and Cornish’s social psychological theory of transformative communication to reshape individual endorsement of community norms that negatively affect gender equitable reproductive decision-making among couples in rural Uganda.MethodsThis study aimed to qualitatively evaluate the effect of FH = FW’s community dialogue approach on participants’ personal endorsement of community norms counter to family planning acceptance and gender equity. A pilot quasi-experimental controlled trial was implemented in 2021. This paper uses qualitative, post-intervention data collected from intervention arm participants (N = 70) at two time points: 3 weeks post-intervention (in-depth interviews, n = 64) and after 10-months follow-up (focus group discussions [n = 39] or semi-structured interviews [n = 27]). Data were analyzed through thematic analysis.ResultsThe community dialogue approach helped couples to reassess community beliefs that reinforce gender inequity and disapproval of family planning. FH = FW’s inclusion of economic and relationship content served as key entry points for couples to discuss family planning. Results are presented in five central themes: (1) Community family size expectations were reconsidered through discussions on economic factors; (2) Showcasing how relationship health and gender equity are central to economic health influenced men’s acceptance of gender equity; (3) Linking relationship health and family planning helped increase positive attitudes towards family planning and the perceived importance of shared household decision-making to family wellness; (4) Program elements to strengthen relationship skills helped to translate gender equitable attitudes into changes in relationship dynamics and to facilitate equitable family planning communication; (5) FH = FW participation increased couples’ collective family planning (and overall health) decision-making and uptake of contraceptive methods.ConclusionCommunity dialogues may be an effective intervention approach to change individual endorsement of widespread community norms that reduce family planning acceptance. Future work should continue to explore innovative ways to use this approach to increase gender equitable reproductive decision-making among couples in settings where gender, religious, and community norms limit reproductive autonomy. Future evaluations of this work should aim to examine change in norms at the community-level.Trial registrationClinicaltrials.gov (NCT04262882).

Post-Truth Protest: How 4chan Cooked Up the Pizzagate Bullshit

Most clustering algorithms tend to separate large scale online communities into several meaningful sub-communities by extracting cut points and cut edges. However, these algorithms are not effective on dense and concentrated graphs which do not have any meaningful cut points. Common problems with the previous algorithms are as follows. First, the size of the first cluster is too large as it may contain many incompatible users. Second, the quality and the purity of the clusters are very low. Third, only the dominant first cluster is found to be meaningful. To address these problems, we first propose a graph transformation to separate large scale online communities into two different types of meaningful subgraphs. The first subgraph is the intimacy graph and the second is the reputation graph. Then, we present the effective algorithms for discovering good sub-communities and for excluding incompatible users in these subgraphs. The experimental results show that our algorithms allow for extracting more suitable and meaningful sub-communities than the previous work in dense online networks.

Vibrant online communities are in constant flux. As members join and depart, the interactional norms evolve, stimulating further changes to the membership and its social dynamics. Linguistic change --- in the sense of innovation that becomes accepted as the norm --- is essential to this dynamic process: it both facilitates individual expression and fosters the emergence of a collective identity. We propose a framework for tracking linguistic change as it happens and for understanding how specific users react to these evolving norms. By applying this framework to two large online communities we show that users follow a determined two-stage lifecycle with respect to their susceptibility to linguistic change: a linguistically innovative learning phase in which users adopt the language of the community followed by a conservative phase in which users stop changing and the evolving community norms pass them by. Building on this observation, we show how this framework can be used to detect, early in a user's career, how long she will stay active in the community. Thus, this work has practical significance for those who design and maintain online communities. It also yields new theoretical insights into the evolution of linguistic norms and the complex interplay between community-level and individual-level linguistic change.

The excessive amount of data that online users produce through social media platforms provides valuable insights about users and communities at scale. Existing techniques have not fully exploited such data to help practitioners perform a deep analysis of large online communities. Lack of scalability hinders analyzing communities of large sizes and requires tremendous system resources and unacceptable runtime. This paper introduces a new analytical query that reveals the top-k posts of interest of a given user community over a period of time and in a certain location. We propose a novel indexing framework that captures the interactions of community users to provide a low query latency. Moreover, we propose efficient query algorithms that utilize the index content to prune the search space. The extensive experimental evaluation on real data has shown the superiority of our techniques and their scalability to support large online communities.

The phrase “leading from behind” is borrowed from group analytic theory, an important branch of group psychology. For some, the phrase may be pejorative: an effective leader is normally in front of group members, not taking a position behind them. However, for large online Communities of Practice, leading from behind and trusting the group is an important strategy. This chapter focuses on how a leader develops the capacity to trust the group. Recognizing that groups of people are powerful and creative organisms that can be trusted is difficult for a leader. For Freud, who thought of groups as unthinking, primitive mobs and for modern managers, who are taught the value of using teams with specific objectives and limited life spans, the idea of unstructured, dispersed collections of people making decisions or taking action is an anathema. Learning to trust the knowledge of a large group takes training, practice and courage. We ground our conclusions in an empirical analysis of the leadership of one large online Community of Practice. Using archives of discussions among community members, we develop leadership principles that support the “leading from behind” approach. We use these data to suggest how managers can lead online communities to form the trusting relationships that are essential for effective knowledge sharing and innovation.

Social media platforms generate massive amounts of data that reveal valuable insights about users and communities at large. Existing techniques have not fully exploited such data to help practitioners perform a deep analysis of large online communities. Lack of scalability hinders analyzing communities of large sizes and requires tremendous system resources and unacceptable runtime. This article proposes a new analytical query that identifies the top- k posts that a given user community has interacted with during a specific time interval and within a spatial range. We propose a novel indexing framework that captures the interactions of users and communities to provide a low query latency. Moreover, we propose exact and approximate algorithms to process the query efficiently and utilize the index content to prune the search space. The extensive experimental evaluation on real data has shown the superiority of our techniques and their scalability to support large online communities.