PORTSMOUTH – The role of social media and its impact on political discourse was the subject of a forum hosted by UNH's Carsey School for Public Policy at 3S Artspace on Tuesday night.

Michael Ettlinger, director of the Carsey School, led a conversation with Reddit Director of Communications Anna Soellner, who discussed the website's organizing structure and how users connect through Reddit's hundreds of thousands of “communities.”

“Reddit is a social media site, but it's really a collection of communities. Instead of being organized around your personal identity, Reddit is organized around passion points,” said Soellner. “It is governed fundamentally by users and moderators, moderators often start a community. There are Reddit rules, those are our terms of service, there are not a lot of rules but there are some and we enforce them. Then, each community also can govern that community itself, so they may have much stricter rules or no rules at all. They can govern rules such as speech or how users relate to one another.”

Soellner said the website sees more than 330 million monthly active users, making it the fourth or fifth most popular website among Americans, fluctuating with Amazon. She said there are approximately 140,000 different communities centered on, “every topic under the sun” and focused on how individuals from across the political spectrum engage with other users in their own “communities” and also in broader political discussions.

“Fundamentally, people come to Reddit for the comments, which is another point of differentiation (with other social media outlets),” said Soellner, who pointed to the “pseudonymous” nature of the website, which administrators believe encourages users to engage in topics of interest they may otherwise be hesitant to discuss if they were forced to engage under their real name. “You have to be your empirical self all day when you're at work, with your family; your gender, marital status, your race, your creed, etc. On Reddit, we feel that is important that you explore all the other aspects of yourself.”

Soellner said it was the embracing of personal identity among users who supported President Donald Trump's campaign that may have received more of a boost over the campaign of Hillary Clinton in Reddit communities because Trump supporters felt more intimately engaged to Trump's campaign through Reddit whereas Clinton's campaign maintained more of a distant presence.

“What was unfortunate, I think, the Clinton campaign never engaged with it or they did but in a much minor way. There was a broader phenomena campaign in 2016 and that was obviously the use of social media,” said Soellner. “In terms of just the actual ways in which the campaigns engaged with social media, not just on Reddit but on other social media platforms as well, there's a very different take between what Trump did and what Clinton did. If you look at tweets to see how Trump engaged, it was all in the first person, which made him sound very authentic.

"On the Clinton side, if you look at those tweets, it was in the third person. I think it was a little bit of that arm's length dispassionate conversation about what was happening online. You don't need a Reddit consultant to access this community, you just need to show up.”

Though Soellner said most Reddit users are under the age of 35, Portsmouth resident Bill Pope is a user who is older than the website's main demographic and said Reddit's embracing of “down votes” for posts containing material a given community finds too erroneous or non-substantive acts as a self-policing mechanism to elevate the level of discourse within the virtual community.

“Down votes are a powerful tool, if a post is put up with non-substantive content, it gets down-voted. It becomes diminished with low visibility and the community views it as not worth the time to have a discussion about,“ said Pope. “The community cares about what is discussed within itself. They all want to get into the fine details of whatever the topic is, learn from each other so we can understand our differences more and discuss them in a rational conversation.”