I Ran an Experiment on Reddit
This is what I learned.
Lately, I’ve been curious about how the same event can be so-differently portrayed by various news media. I thought, “Why don’t I try the same thing, but with political Reddit communities instead of news stations?” So I did. I posted these two articles that I wrote on several communities on reddit.com and noted something that I found interesting.
They are both slanted to the left, politically, and express only my own opinions.
To skip to the main takeaways, scroll down to the “Conclusion” section.
Method
I posted the mask article on the following Reddit communities:
r/Conservative, r/Conservatives, r/TexasConservative, r/Masks4All, r/democrats, r/WayOfTheBern, r/Libertarian
My post was removed from the following communities:
r/Conservative, r/democrats
I posted the feminism article on the following Reddit communities:
My post was removed on the Feminism community after several hours of being up. I was also muted on r/Feminism for 28 days.
Discussion of Results
Results from the mask article
Most of the replies I received came from the r/Libertarian and r/Masks4All communities. As is to be expected, I received more pushback from the libertarian community than from the Masks4All one. However, I didn’t anticipate as much support from the libertarians as I originally expected. I received many upvotes on several of my posts in that thread, such as one where I said:
I noticed several users seemingly making up numbers and some even resorting to name-calling:
Despite these few occurrences, I generally had intelligent discussions on the Libertarian community. On the r/conservatives one on the other hand, there were plenty more instances of insults and other hateful comments.
I found it very fascinating that these individuals who believe themselves to be helping children, are the same ones who attacked a teenager — me — for speaking up for what he believes in.
My experience in this community was radically different from the libertarian one, but I will note that the conservatives reacted as I had originally expected the libertarians to react. On r/Libertarians, for the most part our conversations were respectful and intelligent. My opinion of them has absolutely changed as a result of this informal study.
On the r/Masks4All community, all of the comments were what I expected: many people agreed with me, called it a nice article, and expressed that masks should not be a political issue.
Few users on the other left-leaning communities replied.
Results from the feminism article
Surprisingly, I received 6 upvotes on the r/MensRights community. I wonder if they read the title and upvoted without reading the article or if they actually agreed with the opinions I expressed in it. Several users accused me of lying or blindly believing others despite the fact that my article was about my own experience as a male feminist. I attribute that to either preconceived notions about feminists or lack of reading the article before replying.
Many users expressed having negative experiences with feminists in the past. They believe that all feminists work to suppress/take over/kill all men. I received over 70 replies within 7 hours of posting the link to the article.
It does seem that most users who replied have very strong opinions against feminism. They believe that toxic masculinity is a derogatory term invented by feminists to harm men.
On the r/Feminism community, they removed my post after several hours. Here is what a moderator gave as their reasoning:
Basically, she relayed to me that the article was fine, except for the title, the topic, and the content.
Along with the moderator’s response, a few other posts also disapproved of my article. I must say that I’m very disappointed with my experience there. I was apparently misguided in my belief that men could be feminists.
Other than those replies, there was one more that complimented my article. I wish I were able to have more data on how the r/Feminism community, but a moderator unfortunately decided it had to be removed.
Limitations of These Results
This study took place in under one week and on one single social media platform. As such, there is no way to make significant determinations about the beliefs of these political groups, only about those of the users who responded. Also, those with stronger opinions — usually negative — are more likely to respond than those whose opinion falls in the middle.
Conclusion
Masking was surprisingly a much less-polemical discussion than feminism.
Overall, I noticed an issue with users putting words in my mouth that were never expressed by me. I was accused of being ignorant, demanding, arrogant, defending hate movements, pushing a narrative, and associating with hate. What’s worse is that I received this by people who believed me to be a child.
I was downvoted for asking users’ reasoning behind their dislike of my article.
I was unwelcome as a male feminist in the r/Feminism community. In a lot of ways, my experiences with feminists on Reddit does not support my experiences with feminists in real life and on other social media. I think that this is one of the main reasons the r/MensRights users were so deeply against feminists.
I will probably stay away from politics on Reddit for a while.
This was technically an observational study, not an experiment, but for the purpose of this article, the semantics aren’t important.
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