and didn't respond to requests for comment. He didn't respond to questions about the story about the protest at Dartmouth, but said anyone writing fake news at would be fired. Local and campus news outlets quoted police saying there were no complaints of violence. To source their stories, 'we stick to established news sources: CNN, AP, Forbes,' Melnik said.Ī story shared on Reddit, published by, reported violence on campus at Dartmouth after a Black Lives Matter protest. In addition to, Nithyanand found links to sites like and, which featured a story in 2015 saying a Black Lives Matter protest at Dartmouth College turned violent even though local and campus news reported the police said there were no complaints of violence.ĭennis Melnik, vice president at Coed Media Group, said the company doesn't publish fake or fabricated news in its news section and noted that its stories have appeared in Google News since April. Jackson on Donald Trump: 'If That Motherf*cker Becomes President I Will Move my Black Ass to South Africa.'' (Jackson made the remark as part of a comedy bit on 'Jimmy Kimmel Live', but some websites repeated his joke as sincere.) That includes links to stories like one posted on with the headline, 'Samuel L. What's more, over 80 percent of all posts and comments about links to these sites were on Republican-affiliated subreddits before and after the election, Nithyanand said. What the researchers found is that visitors to Republican-affiliated subreddits were 600 percent more likely to see links to controversial sources after the start of the Republican primaries, and 1,600 percent more likely after the Republican National Convention in July 2016, than they were before the campaigns started. The political subreddits included nonpartisan forums like r/politics as well as party- and candidate-specific subreddits like r/Republicans and r/SandersForPresident. That included all posts from 124 political subreddits and a random sampling of posts and comments from nonpolitical subreddits. Nithyanand examined 12 million posts and 332 million comments on Reddit, according to his paper. And the Pew Research Center published analysis of political conversations on Reddit in the run-up to the primary elections.īut neither looked at the trends Nithyanand and his co-authors sought out, including the spread of misinformation on Reddit. Political statistics news site FiveThirtyEight published analysis of r/The_Donald, a popular forum supporting Trump's campaign, showing what it had in common with more niche and trollish subreddits. Nithyanand isn't the first to wonder what's influencing political forums on Reddit.

The same research showed that 63 percent of redditors are white, at a time when the US adult population was 65 percent white. Research from the Pew Research Center from 2016 showed that 58 percent of Reddit users are between the ages of 18 and 29. Reddit Vice President Zubair Jindali told eMarketer in 2016 that more than 87 percent of the site's 200 million monthly visitors were millennials. Men make up the majority of Reddit users - about 64 percent as of October. That means each subreddit develops its own tone and norms of behavior. Redditors follow internal rules enforced by each forum's moderators and vote on each other's comments. Reddit, founded in 2005, gets its influence by serving as the place for thousands of daily online conversations about every topic you can think of, from fandoms to hobbies to religion and politics. He did his research on Reddit with fellow computer scientist Phillipa Gill and political science researcher Brian Schaffner, both of the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Trained in data science at Stony Brook University, Nithyanand has researched communication and censorship on the internet, and his projects have been written about in Wired, Newsweek and Vox.

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