Political Reddit Climates in the US versus UK
By: Alex Gherman
Tags: UK Politics, Data Visualization, USA, Reddit, Politics

What Political Redditors Are Reading

To find which news sources were most popular, we grouped each link into domain names, and then counted how many times a unique domain was shared. We then plotted the top 10 domains for each subreddit. Figure 1 shows the 10 most posted sources for each subreddit, and serves as a good baseline for further research.

Figure 1: Bar graph comparing the different domains that reached popular on /r/politics /r/ukpolitics.

It’s particularly interesting to note that there are almost no shared subreddits besides the Independent. In addition, the UK subreddit has many domains that are platforms themselves, rather than news websites, such as Twitter, Imgur, and Reddit. This is most strikingly seen in the most frequent source for both subreddits where the US politics top source is The Hill, a newspaper specializing in US political news, the top source for UK politics is Twitter.

The UK subreddit seems to share tweets from government officials regularly as well as political cartoons (Imgur), however, this is also affected by their rules; while the US political subreddit only allows official publications, the UK subreddit is a lot looser in its limitations, allowing posts with a platform post. A possible explanation for this is their size: /r/politics is a default subreddit, meaning that a lot more content is shared, and is difficult to manage whereas /r/ukpolitics is much smaller, and may need looser submission rules and a more decentralized nature to maintain activity.

Looking at Figure 1, we can see that /r/politics is a more reliable source of information as compared to /r/ukpolitics as they do a better job of keeping posts relevant and from official news sources.

News Source Analysis

Figure 2, seen below, indicates the political leaning of each news source. Red indicates right-leaning, blue indicates left-leaning, purple indicates independent/center-leaning, and gray indicates a platform, such as Twitter. Analyses from allsides.com and mediabiasfactcheck.com as well as adfontesmedia.com were used to find leanings.

Figure 2: Table of top 10 news sources and their political leanings for the US and UK political subreddits.

It is interesting to see that /r/politics has so many left-leaning sources, but on the other hand, a right-leaning source seems to reach popularity at a significantly higher rate. Looking at the most popular source, one can argue that the subreddit is right-leaning, but if you look at the number of left-leaning sources within the top 10, one can argue that the sub is left-leaning.

Looking at /r/ukpolitics, there are more left-leaning sources in total, and they reach popularity at a higher rate than right-leaning sources thus we would argue that /r/ukpolitics is a left-leaning subreddit. Compared to the US, the UK’s popularity of individuals using platforms such as Twitter, /r/ukpolitics, Reddit and Imgur to share political opinions is quite interesting. In a way, it makes us question if individuals in the UK see social platforms as a faster way to share political opinions? Do they view these sites as reliable?

In order to assess bias and political leaning, we cross referenced the domains with adfontesmedia, allsides and mediabiasfactcheck. During our analysis on top Reddit news sources, as shown above, a survey by YouGov in 2017 which asked respondents to rate political leanings in the UK corresponded with what we came across during our background studies on UK politics and UK news sources in 2021 (Figure 3).