Extracting Inter-community Conflicts in Reddit Srayan Datta Eytan Adar University of Michigan University of Michigan
[email protected] [email protected] Abstract Anti-social behaviors in social media can happen both at user and community levels. While a great deal of attention is on the individual as an ‘aggressor,’ the banning of entire Reddit subcommunities (i.e., subreddits) demonstrates that this is a multi-layer concern. Existing research on inter-community conflict has largely focused on specific subcommunities or ideological opponents. However, antago- nistic behaviors may be more pervasive and integrate into the broader network. In this work, we study the landscape of conflicts among subreddits by deriving higher-level (community) behaviors from the way individuals are sanctioned and rewarded. By constructing a conflict network, we characterize different patterns in subreddit-to-subreddit conflicts as well as communities of ‘co-targeted’ sub- reddits. By analyzing the dynamics of these interactions, we also observe that the conflict focus shifts over time. keywords: Inter-group conflict, Reddit, social network analysis, conflict network 1 Introduction Anti-social behavior in social media is not solely an individual process. Communities can, and do, antagonize other groups with anti-social behaviors. Similarly, both individuals and communities can be sanctioned in reaction to this behavior. On Reddit, for example, individuals can be banned or otherwise be sanctioned (e.g., have their posts down-voted). Likewise, entire subreddits can also be sanctioned when multiple individuals use the community as a platform for generating conflict, in violation of general Reddit norms. Critically, the form of anti-social behavior at the community level can be quite varied.