  Research on online political communication has primarily focused on content
in explicitly political spaces. In this work, we set out to determine the
amount of political talk missed using this approach. Focusing on Reddit, we
estimate that nearly half of all political talk takes place in subreddits that
host political content less than 25% of the time. In other words, cumulatively,
political talk in non-political spaces is abundant. We further examine the
nature of political talk and show that political conversations are less toxic
in non-political subreddits. Indeed, the average toxicity of political comments
replying to a out-partisan in non-political subreddits is even less than the
toxicity of co-partisan replies in explicitly political subreddits.
