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Cited by 26Social Media and PoliticsMisinformation and Its ImpactsPopulism, Right-Wing Movements

Roots of Trumpism: Homophily and Social Feedback in Donald Trump Support on Reddit

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Massachs, Joan, Monti, Corrado, Morales, Gianmarco De Francisci, Bonchi, Francesco·2020·12th ACM Conference on Web Science
DOI 10.1145/3394231.3397894
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Abstract

We study the emergence of support for Donald Trump in Reddit’s political discussion. With almost 800k subscribers, “r/The_Donald” is one of the largest communities on Reddit, and one of the main hubs for Trump supporters. It was created in 2015, shortly after Donald Trump began his presidential campaign. By using only data from 2012, we predict the likelihood of being a supporter of Donald Trump in 2016, the year of the last US presidential elections. To characterize the behavior of Trump supporters, we draw from three different sociological hypotheses: homophily, social influence, and social feedback. We operationalize each hypothesis as a set of features for each user, and train classifiers to predict their participation in r/The_Donald.

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  • Participation in r/The_Donald is a valid proxy to study Donald Trump support.

    “Participation in this subreddit is a valid proxy to study Donald Trump support, as the rules of this subreddit explicitly state that the community is for “Trump Supporters Only”, and that dissenting users will be removed.”

    From No echo in the chambers of political interactions on Reddit (2021) · cites this paper as [35]

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Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Massachs, J., Monti, C., Morales, G. D. F., & Bonchi, F.
Affiliations
  • Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (ES)
  • Institute for Scientific Interchange (IT)
Venue
12th ACM Conference on Web Science
Publisher
ACM
Published
2020-07-06
Pages
49-58
DOI
10.1145/3394231.3397894
OpenAlex
W3023930752
Cited by
26
References
0
Citations by year
2025: 5 · 2024: 3 · 2023: 5 · 2022: 8 · 2021: 5
FWCI
16.52
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Licence
www.acm.org/publications/policies/copyright_policy#Background (vor)
Locations
  • ACM Web Science Conference (WebSci) (publishedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Communication › Social Media and Politics
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Misinformation and Its Impacts
  • Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › Populism, Right-Wing Movements
Keywords
Trumpism, Donald Trump, Reddit, online political communities, homophily, social influence, social feedback, 2016 US presidential election, user participation

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