Using R to scrape and analyse Reddit comments
r/politics
/r/politics is the subreddit for current and explicitly political U.S. news, and aims to be a politically neutral platform for civil discussion.
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This ideal is reinforced looking at the comment distribution with regards the current and former presidents, across the top 100 words the search terms produced near identical mean word scores. Surprisingly, there were more positive words associated with Donald Trump than Obama. although only by a small margin. What is sad to see is that the phrase 'nigger' appeared in the most negative words to be used when searching for Obama. There is not a notalble use of similar racial language in r/politics when searching for Donald Trump.
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Looking at language related to political party, the scores are reversed from the discussion of their leaders.
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Comments related to the democratic party showed a higher use of positive scoring words and a higher mean word score as a result.
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Comment about the Republican party showed a lower mean Afinn scoring, but with the most negative words having a relatively lower adjusted score. It is interesting to note that the republican party was mentioned in comments at 10x the rate of the democratic party, this is probably due to the nature of the republicans being currently in majority.
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Looking at the faceted data, we can see that both the terms 'democrat' and 'Trump' draw strongly frequent and high scoring positive words, which does point towards this subreddit being politically neutral. However the high degree of foul language suggests it may not be the place for 'civil discussion' as it claims.