Through Thick and Thin: Reexamining r/The_Donald's Quarantine Using Network Methods

Abstract

The subreddit r/The_Donald was a popular political forum that supported the Trump campaign and presidency through stimulating talking points, combating online detractors, and generating memes utilized by right-wing figures. After subreddit users continuously disregarded site rules regarding threats of violence, Reddit administrators first restricted and then banned the community in 2019 and early 2020. Previous efforts to understand how this sudden change to communication pathways led to declines in activity on r/The_Donald in the long run as well as shorter run drops in hate speech on subreddits that community members turned to after losing access to their previous home. This approach misses the importance of social ties between prominent members of the r/The_Donald community and cannot answer how enmeshed these accounts remained after the restriction. Utilizing social network analysis techniques, I analyze how the interactions between frequent r/The_Donald commenters changed after the quarantine. I find that recurring users were more densely connected in the three weeks after the quarantine than they were before it, that users posted in similar subreddits in July that they had in June, and that pre-quarantine in-degree was highly predictive of post-quarantine in-degree. In this paper I employ a network analysis framework to describe this important shift in platform activity, lending credence to the importance of communication ties on social media sites and posing new questions about the future of online moderation and the resiliency of new forms of social politics.