On the Relation Between Opinion Change and Information Consumption on Reddit

TL;DR

This study explores how self-reported opinion changes on Reddit influence subsequent online community participation, revealing links to propaganda language and enabling prediction of future engagement shifts.

Contribution

It introduces a novel analysis of opinion change effects on online behavior using Reddit's structured self-reporting system, highlighting propaganda's role in community engagement shifts.

Findings

Opinion change correlates with altered community participation.

Propaganda-like language increases likelihood of leaving or joining communities.

A predictive model can identify communities affected by opinion change with moderate accuracy.

Abstract

While much attention has been devoted to the causes of opinion change, little is known about its consequences. Our study sheds a light on the relationship between one user's opinion change episode and subsequent behavioral change on an online social media, Reddit. In particular, we look at r/ChangeMyView, an online community dedicated to debating one's own opinions. Interestingly, this forum adopts a well-codified schema for explicitly self-reporting opinion change. Starting from this ground truth, we analyze changes in future online information consumption behavior that arise after a self-reported opinion change on sociopolitical topics; and in particular, operationalized in this work as the participation to sociopolitical subreddits. Such participation profile is important as it represents one's information diet, and is a reliable proxy for, e.g., political affiliation or health choices. We find that people who report an opinion change are significantly more likely to change their future participation in a specific subset of online communities. We characterize which communities are more likely to be abandoned after opinion change, and find a significant association (r=0.46) between propaganda-like language used in a community and the increase in chances of leaving it. We find comparable results (r=0.39) for the opposite direction, i.e., joining a community. This finding suggests how propagandistic communities act as a first gateway to internalize a shift in one's sociopolitical opinion. Finally, we show that the textual content of the discussion associated with opinion change is indicative of which communities are going to be subject to a participation change. In fact, a predictive model based only on the opinion change post is able to pinpoint these communities with an AP@5 of 0.20, similar to what can be reached by using all the past history of participation in communities.