Propaganda on Reddit
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From the Stage to the Audience: Propaganda on Reddit Oana Balalau Roxana Horincar Inria, Institut Polytechnique de Paris Thales Research & Technology France France [email protected] [email protected] Abstract represent the center-left and the center-right. The Labour Party has social democratic and socialist Political discussions revolve around ideologi- cal conflicts that often split the audience into factions, while the Conservative Party has many two opposing parties. Both parties try to win factions, such as one-nation conservatism, liberal the argument by bringing forward information. conservatism, or social conservatism. In recent However, often this information is mislead- years, both countries passed through significant po- ing, and its dissemination employs propaganda litical turmoil, such as Donald Trump’s election techniques. In this work, we analyze the im- in the US and the referendum on leaving the EU pact of propaganda on six major political fo- in the UK. However, a recent opinion piece in the rums on Reddit that target a diverse audience Washington Post highlights an essential difference in two countries, the US and the UK. We focus on three research questions: i) who is posting between the political discourse in the two coun- propaganda? ii) how does propaganda differ tries. The journalist believes that the division be- across the political spectrum? and iii) how is tween the left and the right in America is driven by propaganda received on political forums? the different interpretations the two parties give to the words “rights”, “liberty” or “freedom”, which 1 Introduction have a strong moral imperative. This difference is Propaganda, translated from Latin as “things that not present in the UK, hence political parties there must be disseminated”, represents information in- might find it easier to reach common grounds. tended to persuade an audience to accept a partic- ular idea or cause by using specific strategies or Our contribution to the study of propaganda in stirring up emotions. Our work is the first study that online discussions is in investigating the following leverages a high quality annotated dataset of pro- research questions: i) Who is posting propaganda? paganda techniques (Da San Martino et al., 2019) ii) How does propaganda differ across the politi- to understand the impact of propaganda on online cal spectrum or different countries? and iii) How conversations. is propaganda received on political forums? We In this paper, we perform an in-depth and long- believe we are the first to investigate these impor- term analysis of propaganda on online forums. We tant questions in forums with different political focus on six subreddits from two English speaking leaning. For the first question, we find that media countries, the US and the UK, for one year. We sources’ political bias is a strong indicator of the select a popular subreddit for political news with tendency of using propaganda and that a smaller no party affiliation and two subreddits dedicated to community of users is disproportionately spreading each country’s dominant parties. In the US, the two propagandistic articles. Regarding the second ques- main parties are the Democrat and the Republican tion, we find that forums dedicated to less popular party. The Democrat party is center-left; however, parties in a country are more likely to post biased it contains several factions with ideologies varying news and that cultural differences might dictate from the center to the left. The Republican Party is which propaganda techniques are employed. Fi- a center-right party and has shifted in recent years nally, we find that if a submission or comment has towards national conservatism. In the UK, the most more propaganda content, it might receive more popular parties are the Labour Party and the Con- user engagement, measured either as the number servative Party. Similarly to the US, these parties of comments or as upvotes and downvotes. 3540 Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 3540–3550 April 19 - 23, 2021. ©2021 Association for Computational Linguistics 2 Related Work techniques, as well as their type. In (Kellner et al., 2020), the authors quantify the influence of trolls Analysis of political discussions. (Roozenbeek on Twitter that contribute to the propaganda spread and Salvador Palau, 2017) explore the role of online during political elections in online communities. communities in elections and how different types Studies on the use of propaganda have also helped of new events impact their dynamics. In (Soli- understand how terrorist organizations share their man et al., 2019), the authors analyze political ideology and attract new members (Al-Rawi and communities (subreddits on Reddit), comparing Groshek, 2020; Bisgin et al., 2019). (Martino et al., them to the content posted, their relationships to 2020) reviews the state of the art of computational other subreddits, and the distribution of attention propaganda detection from both an NLP and a net- received in these subcommunities. They compare work analysis perspective, arguing on the need to left-leaning with right-leaning communities, with combine these communities’ efforts. significant differences emerging, such as higher use of derogatory language in the right-leaning com- Bot detection in political discussions. Research munities, stronger connectivity between the US on political discussions has mostly focused on spe- and the European right-leaning communities, and cialized topics such as adversarial debates between more substantial focus on media sources reflecting two parties, like election campaigns and referen- their political leaning in the left-leaning subreddits. dums. (Rizoiu et al., 2018; Davis et al., 2016) In (Guimaraes et al., 2019), the authors identify use machine learning approaches to study social different conversation patterns that refine the no- bots’ influence in the diffusion of tweets contain- tion of controversy into disputes, disruptions, and ing partisan hashtags surrounding a political debate. discrepancies and perform a systematic analysis (Hurtado et al., 2019) studies political discussions of discussion threads based on essential facets of a on Reddit and uses graph-based methods to reveal a conversation like users, sentiments, and topics. (An fully connected community of users who exhibit a et al., 2019) proposes an analytical template to ex- bot-like behavior. (Costa et al., 2015) introduces a plore the nature of political discussions by studying generative model based on users’ temporal activity the interaction and linguistic patterns within and be- patterns to study abnormal posting behavior both tween politically homogeneous and heterogeneous on Twitter and Reddit data. communication spaces on Reddit. (Carman et al., Journalistic efforts in studying online content. 2018) analyzes the effects of vote manipulation on There have been some relevant initiatives by com- article visibility and user engagement by compar- munities of expert journalists or volunteers to raise ing political threads on Reddit whose visibility is awareness of different online news issues by eval- artificially increased. uating the content published by news outlets and social media. For instance, Media Bias/Fact Check Propaganda detection. Previous works on pro- (MBFC) is an independent organization that an- paganda have focused on proposing datasets to fos- alyzes media in terms of their factual reporting, ter further research, including document-level anno- bias, and propagandist content, among other as- tations (Rashkin et al., 2017; Barron-Cede´ no˜ et al., pects. Full Fact, an independent fact-checking or- 2019) and fragment level annotations (Da San Mar- ganization in the UK, provides free tools, informa- tino et al., 2019). Efforts for constructing anno- tion, and advice for checking claims by politicians tated datasets have also been made in other Eu- and the media. Similar initiatives have been taken ropean languages different from English (Kmetty by US News and World Report and the European et al., 2020; Baisa et al., 2019). Automatic pro- Union. paganda detection approaches are almost always proposed alongside new corpora. (Rashkin et al., 3 Propaganda Techniques 2017) defines a four-class text classification task that detects propaganda, satire, hoaxes, and real Propaganda is a communication technique primar- news, while (Barron-Cede´ no˜ et al., 2019) uses a ily used to influence public opinion towards an binary classification to detect propaganda and non- a-priory established agenda. propaganda articles. (Da San Martino et al., 2019, According to the Institute for Propaganda Anal- 2020) perform fine-grained analysis of texts by ysis, propaganda had its definition pinned in 1938 detecting all fragments that contain propaganda as being “the expression of an opinion or an action 3541 by individuals or groups deliberately designed to • Appeal to fear or prejudice (fallacy) supports influence the opinions or the actions of other indi- a claim by increasing fear towards an alter- viduals or groups with reference to predetermined native, possibly based on preconceived judg- ends” (for Propaganda Analysis, 1938). ments. In the past century, spreading propaganda re- quired controlling traditional journalism media, • Bandwagon (argumentum ad populum fal- such as newsprint, TV, and radio stations. It rep- lacy) persuades the audience that a claim is resented a form of communication that only large