Digital Deliberation: Computational Insights from Discussions in Online Resistance Communities

This paper offers a comparative perspective into the discourse and discussions of two online communities on forum and social media platform Reddit – r/antiwork, a group focused on the issues faced by workers with largely anti-capitalist sentiments, and r/twoxchromosomes, a space for discussions of women’s struggles with anti-patriarchal views. These two cases are representative of online resistance groups, which constitute a distinct form of political engagement and activism in the digital setting. This study first elaborates on the motivations behind a comprehensive exploratory research design, including: the novelty of the phenomenon; the lack of sufficient prior knowledge regarding Reddit as a social deliberation platform; and the under-researched area of online collective discourses. It then provides a theoretical framing of this problem though the concept of everyday resistance, as well as the notions of group solidarity and social identity. The data for this study comprises of textual data – several thousand Reddit posts and their comments in the span of one year (January 2021- January 2022) – analysed using a combination of two computational methods. Findings from topic models utilising Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) demonstrate that discussions in both communities are heavily centred around their shared social identity, despite the anonymous environment. Both groups deliberate extensively on topics related to resistance attitudes and behaviours. Interestingly, however, the ways in which resistance is understood differs vastly, with r/antiwork engaging in more radical and explicit discourses, and r/twoxchromosomes being more focused on “offline” activism, legal and political reform. Some models indicate that members of r/antiwork express less solidarity to their fellow participants than members of r/twoxchromosomes. Equally, the latter group demonstrates a higher cohesion and more interactions between its members, while the former shows a more superficial pattern of interaction. Additionally, results from a network analysis determining the width (highest number of comments to each post) and the depth (highest number of “nested” comments) of the discussions shows a lack of decisive correlation between levels of deliberation and interactivity on the one hand, and group size on the other. Based on these results, I argue that scope and interactivity of group discussions in online resistance communities are affected by group cohesion and solidarity, and most crucially – social identity salience. While this finding may offer helpful insights in the areas of social and political psychology, I suggest it is particularly valuable in the field of digital participation, by offering a lens through which online civil and political engagement can be better understood both as a medium of discussing resistance practices, and as a practice of everyday resistance itself. Note: This paper is part of my lager doctoral thesis project “Rethinking Resistance: A Mixed Methods Approach to Discourses and Solidarity in Online Communities” (in progress).