Interest in Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders was clear among Reddit users well in advance of primary season

Updated Edition, May 26, 2016: This new edition of our February 2016 report contains updated survey data. It takes into account newer weighting measures that the Pew Research Center has adopted for its American Trends Panel. Details on the weighting are provided in the appendix.

The online discussion forum, Reddit, launched in 2005, is proving to be one of the more news-oriented social spaces on the Web. While it reaches a relatively small slice of the population, a large portion of its users report getting news there, and Reddit can drive substantial attention to news events.

A new survey from Pew Research Center finds that while just 4% of U.S. adults report using the site – a user base that is more likely to be young, male and liberal than the general public – 70% of Reddit users say they get news there. What’s more, 45% of Reddit users learn about the 2016 presidential campaign in a given week from the site. This is on par with the portion of Facebook (52%) and Twitter users (43%) who get news and information about the election on those platforms and outpaces most other social networking sites asked about.

Reddit attracts major newsmakers – President Obama conducted a Q&A session on the site (referred to, in the local parlance, as an “Ask Me Anything” or AMAs) in August of 2012, which attracted more than 20,000 comments, and more recently it played host to celebrities such as Amy Poehler in 2014 and Channing Tatum in 2015. With many posts linking to outside content, Reddit sends many of its millions of daily visitors to publishers, though not as many as do Facebook or Twitter.

Terminology “Subreddits” are roughly equivalent to forums on message boards and are based around a subject (such as /r/politics) or the process used to discuss a variety of subjects (such as /r/AskAnAmerican or /r/explainlikeimfive). Users visiting a subreddit see a list of submissions. Any user can create a subreddit, and the creator assigns users to “moderate” the subreddit; these users can delete content, ban users and set subreddit rules. “Submissions” or “Posts” are items submitted by users, roughly equivalent to a “post” on a blog. Submissions are made to a specific subreddit (e.g., a submission to /r/politics about voting results in South Carolina). They can be original content (e.g., a user’s thoughts on one candidate’s health care proposals), links to outside content (e.g., a link to a news story about one candidate’s fortunes or a video of a candidate’s speech) or a combination of the two. (In this report, the term “post” is generally used in reference to submissions.) “Comments” are responses, reactions, additions or questions left by Reddit users to a post and/or to other comments. “Discussion threads” are all the comments left in response to a single post and/or to other comments under that post. “Authors” are Reddit users who submit a comment or a post. “Upvoting” and “Downvoting” are ways for users to indicate their opinion of a post or comment they’ve read. Users can “vote” on a comment (or post) by clicking an up arrow (to “upvote”) or down arrow (to “downvote”). When there are more downvotes than upvotes, a comment is said to be “downvoted” and, depending on a user’s settings, may not be visible in the discussion. For more information, please consult Reddit’s FAQ.



The flow of news and information on the site is somewhat different than that of social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. On Reddit, users actively choose to participate in specific discussion groups that interest them, called “subreddits,” rather than creating friend networks. These are roughly equivalent to forums or topics on other online message boards such as Digg or Fark. The names of these subreddits generally describe the topic being discussed (such as /r/politics) or the process they use to discuss a variety of subjects (such as /r/AskAnAmerican or /r/explainlikeimfive). Reddit users write and post an original “submission,” and then other users, or the original author, comment on that post or reply to other comments. Unlike on many more traditional news sites where comment sections are secondary to the articles, on Reddit the discussion among users is a main attraction. As such, Reddit is one site that exemplifies a new facet of people’s ability to connect with news by discussing it with other interested citizens outside the confines of their day-to-day, in-person networks. This report is the latest in a series that explores the role of news on individual social media sites.

To help understand the news dynamics on Reddit, Pew Research Center combined survey work with an inventory and analysis of three months of discussion about the 2016 presidential candidates on Reddit itself.

The opportunity to study the Reddit discussion in such depth was made possible through use of a large dataset of site comments collected by a researcher (a process that could take months to replicate on one’s own due to API rate limits) who made the May 2015 data publicly available initially in July 2015 and then updated the data set with new monthly data thereafter. Pew Research Center researchers initially downloaded the two most recent months available – May and June – and then later, when made available, added September.

The Center’s researchers then measured discussion surrounding each candidate. The size of the dataset necessitated that researchers adopt a hybrid approach: first human analysts determined the candidate described in a sample of comments, then researchers used these data to train a statistical model that utilized word frequencies to detect which, if any, candidate was referenced in the remaining comments.

The analysis focused on the 2016 presidential campaign, which was getting into full swing during this period with more than 20 announced contenders and the first of the debates. All comments naming one of the 21 presidential candidates identified for analysis were captured and studied in depth. Among the highlights of the analysis: