Hate in Echo Chambers and Plural Environments: An Analysis of Reddit’s Communities

Previous research has shown diverse findings on whether social media platforms foster ideological echo chambers or not, i.e., whether social media facilitate the exposure to different political views or simply form ideological echo chambers. From a normative democratic perspective, cross partisan-ideological exposure would increase tolerance and awareness of the legitimacy of opposing points of view. On the contrary, the formation of homogeneous ideological groups would impact negatively on the citizens’ views, polarizing them further and triggering other negative attitudes, such as antagonism and hate. This paper examines the levels of prevalence of hate in online environments with different probability of occurrence of echo chamber’s effects. According to social identity theory (e.g., Tajfel, 1982), individuals get emotional gratifications from the feeling of belonging to a group. According to this theory, social identity is achieved through social comparisons: favourable comparison with the in-group (inclusion) and negative comparison with the out-group (exclusion). Hate speech, negative stereotypes and discrimination arise as a way of reinforcing the identity of the collective (Costello et al, 2019). Following such approach, we would expect that negative comparisons with out-groups were more likely to occur in online communities that bring together like-minded people than in those that are more plural. On the one hand, users would express negative and hateful attitudes towards other groups in these communities as a way to strengthen their social identity. On the other hand, the probability of being disapproved for showing such negative attitudes would be lower in this type of supporting communities. In other words, the feeling of security that that the group offers facilitates the disinhibition of users. However, previous research also suggests that certain negative online behaviours (e.g. affective polarisation) can arise when people face disagreement (Suhay et al., 2018), which is more likely to occur in cross-ideological environments. This research aims to contribute to a better understanding of the links among echo-chambers, polarization, plurality and hate, by investigating the RQ: Is the prevalence of hate higher in online environments where echo chamber’s effects are more likely to occur? Using content analysis, we will assess the prevalence of hate in Reddit’s posts from two types of ‘subreddits’. Reddit is an excellent social media platform to test our RQ, because it includes user communities based on different categories and characteristics; for example, some are based on identities (e.g., nationality or ideological affiliation) while others are not. This social media platform thus allows comparing the prevalence of hate in ‘subreddits’ that are created to bring together users with the same ideological affiliation (e.g. ‘r/Conservative) with those that are created without any predetermined ideological identity (e.g. ‘r/Politics’). This paper is part of the ongoing research project ‘Streams of hate and untruth?’ (PTDC/CPO-CPO/28495/2017 funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology), which studies the prevalence of hate in online environments in six countries.