Pro-Eating Disorders and Pro-Recovery Communities on Reddit: Text and Network Comparative Analyses

Abstract

Online eating disorders communities play a major role in facilitating the communication among users suffering from these illnesses. Most studies have taken interest in the content of these communities, without acknowledging the relationship between the content and the structure of their networks of communication. We present a multi-faceted study where we analyze the content and the network of the pro-eating disorders (pro-ED) community and the pro-recovery community on Reddit by applying an approach that combines topic modeling, social network analysis and sentiment analysis for a better comprehension of these communities on both content and network levels. Through a comparative analysis, we define the main topics both communities address based on their users' content, then we describe the communication patterns of these communities, which leads us to analyze the sentiments of the users with the most connections to other users in addition to the ones that are common between both communities.