Read it on Reddit: Canadian Politics on a Deliberative Numeric Platform

The social networking site Reddit.com is a bulletin board where users submit, evaluate and comment content, shaping the information it provides, including political information, in a horizontal manner. This democratic and deliberative platform stands out in the media landscape, even more so considering its enormous popularity, which justifies more scrutiny into its media effect. Indeed, deliberation is often seen as a crucial component of democracy and a platform that encourages discussions and debates or at the very least interactions between thousands of subjects at any given time within the range of a sets of norms and rules provides an interesting laboratory for political philosophy. Hence, we aim to apply concepts and theories of traditional media analysis to this platform in hopes of determining in what way, if any, it stands out and whether or not its democratic elements distinguish it from traditional media dynamics. Would a particular coherent frame, a tone, saliences or an agenda emerge from an inquiry into its content? Are some users or sources overrepresented in comments and content even considering Reddit’s democratic elements? Does actual deliberation really happen in these comments and with what consequences? To answer these questions we present a software assisted content analysis of the complete database of Reddit’s public comments from October 2007 to May 2015 with a focus on Canadian political events and Canadian communities, also called subreddits.