Abstract
The chapter presents a new social media research tool for studying
subreddits (i.e., groups) on Reddit called Communalytic. It is an
easy-to-use, web-based tool that can collect, analyze and visualize
publicly available data from Reddit. In addition to collecting data,
Communalytic can assess the toxicity of Reddit posts and replies using a
machine learning API. The resulting anti-social scores from the toxicity
analysis are then added as weights to each tie in a “who replies to
whom” communication network, allowing researchers to visually identify
and study toxic exchanges happening within a subreddit. The chapter
consists of two parts: first, it introduces our methodology and
Communalytic’s main functionalities. Second, it presents a case study of
a public subreddit called r/metacanada. This subreddit, popular among
the Canadian alt-right, was selected due to its polarizing nature. The
case study demonstrates how Communalytic can support researchers
studying toxicity in online communities. Specifically, by having access
to this additional layer of information about the nature of the
communication ties among group members, we were able to provide a more
nuanced description of the group dynamics.