Evidence of Demographic rather than Ideological Segregation in News Discussion on Reddit

TL;DR

This study analyzes five years of Reddit news discussions to reveal that demographic factors like age and income lead to segregation, while ideological interactions tend to be more cross-cutting, challenging the echo chamber narrative.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence that demographic segregation persists online and influences interaction patterns more than ideological divides, supported by a novel null model comparison.

Findings

Demographic groups show strong homophily in interactions.

Ideological interactions are more cross-cutting than expected.

Segregation by age and income persists across years.

Abstract

We evaluate homophily and heterophily among ideological and demographic groups in a typical opinion formation context: online discussions of current news. We analyze user interactions across five years in the r/news community on Reddit, one of the most visited websites in the United States. Then, we estimate demographic and ideological attributes of these users. Thanks to a comparison with a carefully-crafted network null model, we establish which pairs of attributes foster interactions and which ones inhibit them. Individuals prefer to engage with the opposite ideological side, which contradicts the echo chamber narrative. Instead, demographic groups are homophilic, as individuals tend to interact within their own group - even in an online setting where such attributes are not directly observable. In particular, we observe age and income segregation consistently across years: users tend to avoid interactions when belonging to different groups. These results persist after controlling for the degree of interest by each demographic group in different news topics. Our findings align with the theory that affective polarization - the difficulty in socializing across political boundaries-is more connected with an increasingly divided society, rather than ideological echo chambers on social media. We publicly release our anonymized data set and all the code to reproduce our results: https://github.com/corradomonti/demographic-homophily