This research is all based on posts created from October 1st, 2017 — March 3rd, 2018 on the following subreddits:

r/the_donald: (580,286 subscribers) — 244,795 submissions collected

r/pics: (18,295,263 subscribers) — 88,812 submissions collected

r/politics: (3,704,450 subscribers) — 87,215 submissions collected

r/nba: (999,630 subscribers) — 15,749 submissions collected

Who posts to these subreddits?

The graphs below show the time of day (in GMT) that posts are submitted to each of these subreddits. Each colored layer represents 5% of users that post on that subreddit. Each user was ranked and sorted based on their posting frequency so that high frequency posters are in the groups at the top of the chart.

Four subreddits, stratified into 5% chunks, ranked by user post frequency.

The blue layer at the top of each subreddit is the most active 5% of users. All subreddits have some amount of imbalance with regards to content submission.

The dip on the right side is nighttime in the United States, showing how many of reddit’s users are in the United States.

Individual layers are clearly visible in the r/pics graph implying more diverse sources of content.

Activity by hour of the day on r/the_donald

There is one other interesting feature on r/the_donald’s graph. At 5am and 11am (and potentially again at midnight) on the graph above, you can see two triangle shaped blemishes towards the bottom of the chart. These caught my eye as they are such a large deviation in posting for what looks like the lower 60% of users.

Here, we look at how much content is produced by users on each subreddit. A subreddit with perfectly balanced participation would be linear. You can see that the line for r/pics is almost straight. This once again illustrates that r/pics has a more diverse group of users submitting content than the other subreddits.

The lines for politics and the_donald however are anything but linear. In fact, 60% of content on r/the_donald is generated by 3.3% of users that post content there. r/politics isn’t much better at 5.4%. r/pics and r/nba are much more balanced at 46.3% and 25.8%, respectively, generating 60% of their content.

Content diversity on r/the_donald is so poor that 2% of all content is submitted by a single account.

Do all of the 5% layers act the same way?

To answer this question, each 5% user group was graphed independently and compared to the overall subreddit’s posting trend. The idea is that, while the populations are grouped by posting frequency, each one should still roughly follow the overall subreddit’s trend.

r/politics user activity by hour. Each graph represents 5% of users that post on the subreddit, from most active (top left) to least active (bottom right).

Each layer of users in r/politics generally follows the same trends, including peaking in the same hour. The reason we see more jagged edges towards the end is because those users don’t post very often and there are relatively few samples.

r/the_donald user activity by hour. Each graph represents 5% of users that post on the subreddit, from most active (top left) to least active (bottom right).

In r/the_donald we see that while the overall trend is present in many layers, there are also multiple layers that seem to buck the trend completely. One particularly striking section of the population are those users that exist in the 60th-70th percentile of r/the_donald posters.

Time of day users in the 60–65th percentile post to r/the_donald

The first thing that you see in these graphs are the massive spikes at 5am and 11am GMT. These spikes are the triangle blemishes we saw in our earlier graph and echos of them can be seen in half of the r/the_donald’s population layers, as either spikes or dips in user activity. I do not have a good explanation for these spikes right now. They do not occur in other subreddits that I’ve examined.

The other interesting thing that you’ll see in the 60–70th percentile users is that there is a large spike of activity at 15:00–17:00 GMT. This is directly opposed to the larger subreddit trend as it occurs during the time that the subreddit is least active.

To put that another way, to see a spike there, the 3600 users in that percentile range would be required to act in a way completely contrary to the rest of the subreddit.

That is interesting, but what does it mean?

I’m not entirely sure and I’m still looking into it further. I have been able to identify at least one network of accounts that are acting in concert to post content on r/the_donald and other relevant subreddits. Below is a graph of their hourly activity.

These accounts and the network they are part of are still being studied and the number of accounts has grown since initially making the graph (which shows 48 accounts that are part of the network).

Notice in the activity graph that no activity ever occurs before 6am GMT (10pm PST, 1am EST, 9am Moscow) and activity always ends before midnight gmt (4pm PST, 7pm EST, 3am Moscow). These posting patterns are completely contrary to the overall subreddit trend. The accounts were identified by ranking users by their standard deviation when measuring the time between posts to r/the_donald. Once identified, manual investigation quickly confirmed these 48 accounts as all being part of the same posting network, using very similar content and comments (including a grammar mistake that appears multiple times on every account identified).

This network has accounts ranging in age from 3 months to 10 years and was last seen active March 3rd, 2018.

The content posted to r/the_donald by this group is exclusively memes hosted on imgur targeting the left, canada, and gun control. The content is generally inline with what I expected to find on r/the_donald.

The user accounts are full of content unrelated to politics and natural comments and user interactions are peppered throughout to keep the accounts feeling authentic at quick glance.