Regularity Versus Novelty of Users' Multimodal Comment Patterns and Dynamics as Markers of Social Media Radicalization

Abstract

Although the internet is a means for disseminating information and facilitating social interactions, these benefits are limited due to individuals' propensity for engaging within a narrow range of communities that share similar beliefs. A portion of these online communities facilitate radicalist viewpoints, including toward marginalized populations, contributing to misbehavior and exacerbating social inequalities. Although a variety of theories propose to explain the processes of online radicalization, less work has empirically examined how users' communication patterns change over time, especially in terms of novelty versus regularity of user comment features. The present research demonstrates a new modeling approach for examining the extent to which low-level, multimodal comment patterns evolve as users communicate within a Reddit forum well-known for its extreme misogynism. Our results confirm that low-level comment patterns predict high-level features of radicalization, aligning with theory on attitude polarization and contributing to literature on detection and interventions to mitigate extremism.