Using R to scrape and analyse Reddit comments
r/latestagecapitalism
r/latestagecapitalism describes itself as 'A Safe Space For Leftist Discussion. Any Liberalism, Capitalist Apologia, Or Attempts To Debate Socialism Will Be Met With An Immediate Ban.'
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That being said, you would expect that this subreddit would have no time for positive discussion of the current US President, Donald Trump. However, looking at the 100 most common words and their distribution we can see that there is a strong use of positive language relating to Trump. The mean word score of -0.58, while negative, is actually higher than r/all which hovers around -0.7.
Barack Obama is a topic discussed much less frequently, but does feature positive language as well as strong negative, which is surprising. ​
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Negative scored words
scraped from rlatestagecapitalism
996
Discussion of US politcal parties is much less common on r/latestagecapitalism than the other subreddits we have explored. Nonetheless, we can see that even in a left wing subreddit, there is divide in the use of language.
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Democrats scored with both highly positive but also some select strong negative words.
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Republicans also scored negatively, with a lower mean word score and more negatively scored words overall.
Looking at the data side by side in this faceted form, we can see that there is a much higher use of intermediate language in r/latestagecapitalism than other subreddits. There are spikes of extreme language use when looking at Obama and to some extent Trump, but the clusters show that words with scores from 2 to -2 are the most frequent.