Reddit and the 2019 Federal Election

Research in Review

Our team selected Reddit as our platform for our study and analyzed the discussions relating the 2019 Federal Election. To determine what we wanted to review, we decided to narrow down our search to focus on the 2019 English Federal Debate. This event was the biggest English Debate during the election with all the political party leaders present. During this debate, there were 5 themes that were selected as the most commonly selected subjects by the commission. The themes included:

Leadership in Canada & the World
Energy and Environment
Polarization, Human Rights, & Immigration
Affordability and Income Security
Indigenous Affairs

Through this initial brainstorming process, we identified 3 primary variables:

Subreddits.
Debate Themes.
Popularity.

Our goal by identifying these variables was to answer 3 questions related to Reddit and the 2019 Federal Election:

Did users on Subreddits talk about the debate themes more before or after the debate?
Which themes were most popular?
Did users in the Subreddits directly reference the English Federal Debate?

We assessed that as the commission had to determine the most popular themes to present a meaningful debate to the general public. Keeping this in mind, we wanted to determine if the commission’s finding would be reflective on a digital platform such as Reddit. It was particularly interesting noting that Reddit was considered to be less common to other platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.

Our team chose 3 Subreddits to conduct the analysis:

r/On Guard for Thee
r/Canada
r/Canada Politics

Once we established our plan, the next step was evaluating the data collection review process. The sample from the 3 subreddits totaled 9600 posts. We selected a 10% randomized sample from August 1, 2019 – October 21, 2019 totaling 936 posts, where the posts were evenly distributed (312 posts per month).

Reflections

The extracted data from Reddit had a lot of information that we did not anticipate and the complexity of the presentation of the JSON data that included the information we wanted to use. Managing this information for the first time, we immediately felt that we needed to reach out for help as it was a bigger learning curve, and didn’t want to run into roadblocks. Once we understood how to navigate the data, we knew that within the few weeks that we had to analyze the data, we could not review all the information. Selecting the titles was our best way of getting a general overview of the conversations while still answering our research questions within the given timeframe. We understood that by doing this, we could not draw meaningful conclusions with the smaller sample to reflect the wider discussions on the platform.

Another important step was understanding the calculation of our popularity variable. The only engagement metrics that were available were the upvotes/downvotes as well as the comments. Through evaluation of our literature review, we realized we could come to some conclusion based on the ratio of upvotes and downvotes. According to we assumed there was a negative connotation to the post. We decided to add the comments to this value as it would add another important engagement value within our posts.

Next Steps

The next steps for this research would include a two-part process. Firstly, our team would need to assess if the discoveries we made were reflective on a larger scale. This could help us verify the effectiveness of our strategic sampling. Once this is assessed, the second part would include reviewing the comments from a sample of the data. Within the popularity formula, we could not assess if the number of comments could determine positive or negative engagement. By evaluating this score, we could conclude more accurately the public response. By taking these two steps, the data can be more representative of the digital climate and help draw more conclusions from our findings.