Quantifying Extreme Opinions on Reddit Amidst the 2023 Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

TL;DR

This paper develops a lexicon-based method to quantify extreme opinions on Reddit during the 2023 Israeli-Palestinian conflict, revealing how real-world events influence online extremism and sentiment polarization.

Contribution

It introduces an unsupervised approach to measure extremism on social media, linking online sentiment dynamics to specific conflict events with detailed analysis.

Findings

Extremism scores peak during key conflict events

Sentiment and extremism vary across subreddits and over time

Word cloud similarity analysis reveals nuanced opinion shifts

Abstract

This study investigates the dynamics of extreme opinions on social media during the 2023 Israeli-Palestinian conflict, utilising a comprehensive dataset of over 450,000 posts from four Reddit subreddits (r/Palestine, r/Judaism, r/IsraelPalestine, and r/worldnews). A lexicon-based, unsupervised methodology was developed to measure "extreme opinions" by considering factors such as anger, polarity, and subjectivity. The analysis identifies significant peaks in extremism scores that correspond to pivotal real-life events, such as the IDF's bombings of Al Quds Hospital and the Jabalia Refugee Camp, and the end of a ceasefire following a terrorist attack. Additionally, this study explores the distribution and correlation of these scores across different subreddits and over time, providing insights into the propagation of polarised sentiments in response to conflict events. By examining the quantitative effects of each score on extremism and analysing word cloud similarities through Jaccard indices, the research offers a nuanced understanding of the factors driving extreme online opinions. This approach underscores the potential of social media analytics in capturing the complex interplay between real-world events and online discourse, while also highlighting the limitations and challenges of measuring extremism in social media contexts.