A Rutgers study comparing political conversations on X (formerly known as Twitter) to similar discourse on Reddit across three topics (the 2022 U.S. midterm elections, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and issues of children and childcare) found the conversations on Twitter were almost universally acrimonious and reflective of the type of polarization that has become stereotypical of social media.

Conversely, while noting that political conversations on Reddit were “hardly perfect,” the researchers said they observed regular instances of people engaging meaningfully across differences and thoughtfully in difficult conversations.

The goal of the study, said SC&I authors Assistant Professor of Communication Sarah Shugars and Ph.D. student Eunbin Ha, was to understand better the role online discourse may play in democratic life, to analyze what ‘political discourse’ looks like on each of these platforms, and also—importantly—to gain insight into how platforms can support more productive political talk.

“We don’t typically think of social media as a space for civic education,” said Shugars, “but our findings suggest that social media platforms can serve as spaces where people are socialized in how​ to have productive political discourse.” The study, “The Character of Connection: Platform Affordances and Connective Democracy,” was published in the journal Social Media + Society.

Shugars and Ha said this was a mixed-methods study, and they used publicly available data from both platforms, X and Reddit, gathering conversations on the three topics of interest. They then conducted an initial computational analysis of conversation toxicity and topical diversity to estimate where each conversation fell along each of these dimensions (e.g., low/high toxicity, low/high topical diversity). They then used this data to inform a sample of conversations they qualitatively studied.

“Connective democracy envisions democracy as a way of life and calls on citizens to engage thoughtfully and earnestly with those who disagree with them. In the digital world, it becomes increasingly important to examine how platforms can cultivate or detract from such connections,” said Shugars.

The qualitative analysis, they said, found numerous instances of Reddit fostering such connections and minimal evidence of such connections on X. To learn more, they conducted a computational analysis to examine how these platforms are structurally different, to determine whether specific features of both X and Reddit were either enabling or constraining political conversations.

They found “There are key differences between the platforms that contributed to users engaging differently in political conversation,” said Shugars. “Some of the key differences we note are that on Reddit people can see and engage with a full conversation, not just single posts. Twitter focuses more on amplification of content, which has made this platform important for many social movements, but also makes it a poor space to have meaningful back-and-forth conversation. Reddit, on the other hand, has a strong sense of community—particularly given the subreddit structure. These findings suggest features we may want in social media platforms in order to have more meaningful political discourse.”

“Perhaps we should never expect online discourse to rise to the level of ideal deliberative democracy,” Shugars added, “but with affordances of community and conversational visibility, we just might be able to build social media that truly helps people connect.”

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