This event is organized by the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society.
The cultural structure of online platforms
Presented by: Assistant Professor Ashton Anderson
Our weekly seminar series welcomes Ashton Anderson, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto and a faculty affiliate with both the Vector Institute and the Schwartz Reisman Institute. His research in computational social science encompasses a diverse range of questions at the intersection of AI, data, and society.
Anderson has worked with big data companies and social media giants such as Yahoo, Google, and Facebook. Before joining U of T, he completed a postdoctoral fellowship with the Computational Social Science Group at the Microsoft Research Lab in New York City.
Abstract:
Optimism about the Internet’s potential to bring the world together has been tempered by concerns about its role in inflaming the “culture wars.” Via mass selection into like-minded groups, online society may be becoming more fragmented and polarized, particularly with respect to partisan differences. However, our ability to measure the cultural makeup of online communities, and in turn understand the cultural structure of online platforms, is limited by the pseudonymous, unstructured, and large-scale nature of digital discussion.
We develop a neural embedding methodology to quantify the positioning of online communities along cultural dimensions by leveraging large-scale patterns of aggregate behaviour. Applying our methodology to 4.8B Reddit comments made in 10K communities over 14 years, we find that the macro-scale community structure is organized along cultural lines. Examining political content, we show Reddit underwent a significant polarization event around the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and remained highly polarized for years afterward. Contrary to conventional wisdom, however, instances of individual users becoming more polarized over time are rare; the majority of platform-level polarization is driven by the arrival of new and newly political users.
Our methodology is broadly applicable to the study of online culture, and our findings have implications for the design of online platforms, understanding the cultural contexts of online content, and quantifying cultural shifts in online behaviour.