The research reported in this section is based primarily on records of 62,981 posts submitted to the /r/SFP subreddit between June 2014 and January 2016. I consider how /r/SFP members approached the task of campaigning for Sanders, what they used their subreddit for and how they organised (or not).

Many of the /r/SFP community dynamics are similar to those observed in a similar case study of anti-SOPA activism on reddit conducted in 2011/2012 (Mills and Fish 2015). When posts are submitted on reddit they begin on a New page where the level of community attention and voting tends to be low, before a post is pushed down this page by subsequent submissions it must receive enough votes to appear on the Rising page if it is to remain active. Posts which scoreFootnote 5 well initially are also shown on the Rising page, where visibility tends to be higher. Reddit’s Hot algorithm is used to select posts for display on the site’s ‘Front Page’Footnote 6, /r/allFootnote 7, and for the ‘Hot’ page shown when a user browses to a particular subreddit (e.g., http://www.reddit.com/r/SandersForPresident).

The ‘Hot’ pages are by far the most visible on reddit, and the algorithm used to select posts imposes a time penalty such that posts ‘age’ at a set rate, advantaging new posts and diminishing old posts. Posts that score very well early in their lifespan appear on Hot pages, and when they do the increased voting rates on these pages tends to keep them there for a number of hours, but the time penalty imposes an upper limit of around 24 h on the age of posts that can appear on these pages (Mills 2014). The way that the Hot algorithm works leads to a highly skewed distribution of votes (and attention) between posts (see Fig. 1)—for /r/SFP the top scoring 1000 posts (2% of all submitted) accounted for 47% of all up-votes and 36% of all comments on the subreddit.

Fig. 1 Distribution of score between /r/SandersForPresident posts, April 2015–January 2016. Both of the axes are logarithmically scaled, the y axis shows the number of posts that were last observed with a certain score. A diagonal line is indicative of a power law distribution. Subreddit score distributions tend to have a point where the slope of the line changes. This inflection point occurs because many submitted posts quickly slide into obscurity as they are pushed down the New page by subsequent submissions. Unless a post receives enough up-votes to earn a place on the Rising page before this happens they will no longer be seen and voted on (Mills 2014) Full size image

Early stages on /r/SFP (up to 30th April 2015)

/r/SFP was until April 2015 a small subreddit with around 50 posts and 500 comments per month. It should be noted that Bernie Sanders was a relatively familiar figure to /r/politics subscribers and had been warmly welcomed by redditors in an /r/IAmAFootnote 8 interview the previous year (redd.it/24zdnn).

When Sanders announced his candidacy on April 30th he posted an announcement linking to his official site on /r/SFP (redd.it/34epu3). This was an important choice, and one which was likely reasoned out by Sanders’ campaign. By making this post to /r/SFP, Sanders granted that subreddit a kind of endorsement, and when his post appeared at the top of /r/all this directed substantial numbers of redditors to that subreddit—many of whom would not have previously been aware of its existence. Levels of activity on the subreddit increased markedly in a few days—where it had been receiving less than 100 comments per day it was now receiving over 1000 comments daily on a regular basis (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2 Number of comments per day on /r/SFP in April and May 2015 Full size image

One can assume that a member of Sanders’ campaign staff was ‘reddit-savvy’ and understood that a post to /r/SFP by Sanders himself would be up-voted enough to assure placement at the top of /r/all for a considerable period of time. The alternative would have been to submit the post to /r/politics, where it would probably have reached a larger reddit audience (being shown to politics subscribers, default Front page readers and /r/all readers)—but the members of this audience who were the most enthused would have had nowhere to go and nothing to join. Sanders’ act of submitting the announcement post to /r/SFP determined that subreddit as the place to go and community to join for redditors who were already “feeling the Bern”. Posts on reddit are transient, even posts that attract millions of views and thousands of comments today will slip into obscurity and be difficult to find tomorrow. By posting his announcement on /r/SFP, Sanders raised the profile of this subreddit, and everyone who saw this post (and the enthusiasm in its comments) had an option to subscribe to the subreddit and make pro-Sanders content a part of their reddit experience going forward.

Sanders cemented the position of /r/SFP further when he participated in a second /r/IamA interview on 19th May and referenced the subreddit in his header post (redd.it /36j690). Again, this belies a strategy to Sanders’ actions on reddit, capitalising on broadcast-level visibility in the short period when it is available—by channelling people who have just been won over or enthused by some of his answers on a popular /r/IAmA post to a place where they can have a more sustained engagement with his campaign.

Considering the nature of content and action on /r/SFP

As /r/SFP is effectively a sub-community within the larger reddit user-base, moderators had the power to set and enforce rules about the type of content which was allowed. It was clear from the start that this was not a subreddit for debating the merits of Sanders’ candidacy, but rather a community of activists seeking Sanders’ election. The remainder of this section considers the ways in which the /r/SFP community and moderators used the tools available in their environment to pursue that end.

/r/SFP had one key rule that exerted significant influence over the nature of the content observed there—posts must relate to Sanders or his campaign—the subreddit’s moderators took a firm stance on negative information about other candidates, seeking to emulate Sanders’ own position on negative campaigning. These rules have been present since the first version of /r/SFP’s rules were written on 3rd May 2015. They also appear to have been enforced, either through member voting or direct moderator action—because among the top-scoring posts reviewed not one was found that violated these rules.

Two observation periods were defined (April–June and July–August 2015) and the 200 top-scoring posts from each period were selected to be reviewed and coded in temporal sequence. Selecting the posts with the highest scores (or the most comments) allows one to review the posts which were most visible and influential during the period. The disadvantage of this approach is that one doesn’t get a sense of which types of post are unpopular or poorly received by the community.

I paid particular attention to the period of the subreddit’s most prolific growth from mid-April to early May—when a burgeoning community appeared over a period of days and began figuring out how they could coordinate to pursue their goal.

Social media

Almost half of all posts to /r/SFP in 2015 were ‘self’ posts (49%)—these are posts that do not link to an external URL, but contain a text entry written by the submitting user. Self posts accounted for 30% of all up-votes cast in the subreddit and 50% of all comments. Self posts do not link to an external source for the purpose of bringing this to the attention of community members, instead they are created directly by a community member and are often used to spark discussions and propose ideas. Self posts will be considered further in Sect. 2.2.4.

The remainder of this section considers more familiar forms of social media. Youtube (9%), ImgurFootnote 9 (8%), twitter (3%) and Facebook (1.5%) links together accounted for 21.5% of posts submitted to /r/SFP. Twitter posts received higher scores and more comments on average than the three other types, although Imgur posts also scored well and received many comments. The level of discussion on Youtube posts was lowest (see Table 1).

Table 1 Percentage of /r/SFP posts linking to common social media domains, and the percentage of score and comments these posts accounted for Full size table

There is considerable variety in the type of content being linked to by these posts, within as well as between platforms. The use of Imgur is particularly varied, prominent post types including photographs of Sanders with a superimposed quote, photographs of newspaper pages that bear articles about Sanders (to inform others about this change in the media landscape), and photographs taken at Sanders’ events by members, sometimes of/with Sanders himself.

Imgur was also being used as a means of reporting on campaigning actions taken by members, for example sharing an infographic they created about Sanders and Clintons’ policies (redd.it/3jqot7), or a poster image they created (redd.it/3lkvr9). In common with all other domains, a post linking to imgur.com could also represent a call to action, for example by signing up for an event (redd.it/3afhlu).

A post linking to Twitter could also be a call to act, either by re-tweeting a particular message for some tactical purpose (redd.it/3gd9db—asking for re-tweets to promote Sanders’ racial justice plan) or by contacting an individual through twitter (3redd.it/kgezb—to convince Ellen DeGeneres that Sanders is as strong on gender equality as Clinton).

The majority of high-scoring posts that linked to Twitter were tweets by well known individuals/groups that endorsed Sanders or made a positive comment about him (e.g., redd.it/3h76uq, redd.it/3ghz73).

Figure 3 shows a substantial increase in the number and prominence of posts linking to Twitter in late 2015. Underlying this is a trend which is common to all social media domains, but particularly strong for Twitter—a small, but significant proportion of content comes directly from Sanders or official channels. In total there were 320 posts in the period from April 2015 to January 2016 linking to tweets from Sanders’ twitter accounts. These posts represent 0.5% of submissions to /r/SFP, but accounted for 2.2% of all comments and 3.4% of all up-votes cast in the subreddit. /r/SFP acted as an amplifier for this content, re-circulating it to /r/SFP subscribers who are primed to interact with it (Like, Retweet, View), boosting its visibility on the platform where it is hosted.

Fig. 3 Levels of posting, voting and commenting activity for social media domains on /r/SFP by month Full size image

Official

In 2015 and January 2016, 810 posts to /r/SFP linked to the official berniesanders.com campaign website, accounting for 2.1% of all up-votes and 1.8% of all comments. These posts linked to information about Sanders’ campaign, about his policies, or about events—successful posts linking to event pages tended to call on readers to attend the event.

Information about Sanders and his campaign

Aside from self posts and posts linking to social media or official domains, the domains linked to most frequently on /r/SFP were news outlets. Figure 4 shows the domains with the highest aggregate scores on the subreddit.

There are several strong themes to news/information posts on /r/SFP. Of the top scoring 400 posts that were coded, 35 relate to polling and 44 posts link to write-ups about Sanders’ campaign—by collectively up-voting these posts the /r/SFP community was choosing to broadcast information about the progress of the campaign to all of its members.

33 posts linked to information about Sanders’ policies or a specific policy, and 21 linked to write-ups about Sanders’ history. These “historical” posts are interesting because through them /r/SFP members explored their candidate’s track-record back through the decades. Many posts also link to video recordings of old Sanders interviews or debates, and the /r/SFP community can be seen (in comments on these posts) to take pride in the fact that their candidate has consistently advocated for the issues they care about.

In the early stages, posts linking to articles about Sanders’ policies and history served to inform /r/SFP subscribers and arm with them knowledge that they could use in their campaigning. As /r/SFP’s activity levels grew and it began to feature on /r/all (see Sect. 4) up-voting these posts also served to make pro-Sanders content visible to the population of reddit users who were not /r/SFP subscribers.

Community-generated content

Previous sections have explored how the /r/SFP community used the attention-directing tools at their disposal to promote pro-Sanders information from across the web. Around 50% of /r/SFP posts linked outside the subreddit, and the other 50% were self posts. This section considers how /r/SFP members attempted to organise and act in pursuit of their shared goal.

From the beginning of the observation period in April 2015, there are a steady stream of posts that attempt to organise the efforts of the newly forming /r/SFP community. On April 22nd, before the surge of activity when Sanders posted about his candidacy on the subreddit, its members were organising to promote their subreddit within the wider reddit user-base - through a successful $1000 donation drive and advertising campaign (redd.it/33f0pu). The /r/SFP community effectively crowd-sourced the money, targeting strategy, copy and image for this campaign. This campaign seems to have been successful in raising subscriber numbers, according to a post from TrendingBotFootnote 10 on April 29th informing the subreddit that it had the highest growth on the website for the previous day (redd.it/34a80r).

Immediately following Sanders’ announcement there are active posts on /r/SFP seeking to organise the community and capitalise on their enthusiasm (e.g., redd.it/34ez82). Soon after the initial burst of activity, as the subreddit’s membership swelled daily by the thousands, a high-scoring post made the case that the subreddit should be more active in supporting Sanders’ campaign outside reddit (redd.it/36xxtr). Over time that sentiment, that the subreddit must aim for impact outside reddit, grew to become a very strong theme.

Posts about strategy are relatively common throughout the observation period and often scored well, whether these are ideas for a new campaign (redd.it/39aoih) or endeavour (redd.it/3dxnr4), or how to organise more effectively (redd.it/38jnb5). Many of the posts in this vein are not so much strategic discussions as they are direct calls to action, the most common actions being donating (redd.it/37ca90), signing petitions (redd.it/39tgfy), signing up for (redd.it/3afhlu) and attending events(redd.it/3c7ewx).

There are also posts in which people recount their own experience of participating in some pro-Sanders action (redd.it/34ivym) and these can sometimes receive many upvotes and supportive comments. The community’s appreciation of these efforts is expressed through their votes and comments, and these become a potential reward for anyone who takes action for Sanders and posts about it on /r/SFP.

As observed with the SOPA case study (Mills and Fish 2015), a post which scored well did not always have the backing of the /r/SFP community. Many proposals that were up-voted to high-visibility locations attracted critical comments that argued against the action proposed (redd.it/3dsfu2, redd.it/3e376m). There are indications that post voting on reddit tends to be quite fast and shallow, posts that sound exciting often attract big scores—whereas voting for comments, and the ‘best’ ranking algorithm, seems more able to promote high-quality or consensus opinions to the top of the list (Mills 2014). When a course of action is proposed on reddit, to stand any chance of being followed through with the backing of the community it must: (1) attract a high score and appear visibly for a long period, (2) receive many comments that endorse it (the more enthusiastically the better), and (3) have a means to capitalise on that enthusiasm, either immediately (sign a petition, donate) or over a longer period (invitation to join something that allows for sustained communication within a newly forming sub-group, like a new subreddit or some off-site group).

One of the more impressive ‘products’ of the /r/SFP community is a website (FeelTheBern.org) presenting Sanders’ stances in relation to issues. On July 9th, a post (redd.it/3cpspg) was made asking for help to build a website showcasing Sanders’ policies and history in relation to a wide variety of issues. On 12th August the same user returned to announce the launch of feelthebern.org (redd.it/3gpyxt), thanking over 125 volunteers for their help with creating it. Feelthebern.org is a significant resource that members of /SFP and other pro-Sanders groups could subsequently use when advocating for Sanders—in February 2016 it was still being maintained and linked to prominently within the subreddit.

Another theme familiar to reddit and found within /r/SFP relates to users conducting investigations or writing reports about a particular phenomenon. For example, redd.it/3hwa7h presents analysis of Hillary Clinton’s Facebook likes and notes that most recent Likes come from countries where it is possible to buy cheap Likes.