Summary
This paper looks at how different groups of Reddit users get involved with conspiracy theories versus environmental topics. The authors find that men and political views shape how people join conspiracy groups, while age and wealth influence paths into environmental groups. For example, men tend to join conspiracy spaces through political or right-wing areas, while women enter through spiritual subreddits. Environmental topic communities attract wealthier users via technology and finance discussions, and less wealthy users through protest and activism. These differences show that people engage with political topics in online spaces through various routes based on who they are.
What this means in practice
- •For social media moderators: Design moderation strategies by targeting demographic entry points distinctive to conspiracy or environmental communities on Reddit.
- •For digital marketing teams: Craft audience-specific campaigns by understanding demographic pathways into politically charged communities on social platforms.
Abstract
The impact of online platforms in political mobilization is widely documented, yet it remains unclear how it affects different demographic groups. To shed light on this phenomenon, we examine two contrasting cases: engagement with environmental causes on one side, and with conspiracy theories on the other. Both are well represented on Reddit, allowing us to study the different origins of these groups using a network-based method. By inferring age, gender, affluence, and partisanship of Reddit users, we construct stratified transition networks to compare the entry pathways of different demographic groups toward these communities. We find that demographic differentiation operates differently in these two domains. Entry into conspiracy communities is primarily structured by gender and partisanship: masculine users disproportionately arrive through overtly political and alt-right spaces and share right-wing media sources, whereas feminine users more often pass through esoteric and spiritual subreddits before converging on r/conspiracy. In contrast, environmental communities are differentiated mainly by age and affluence. Affluent users tend to approach environmental subreddits via discussions of individual energy management, technology, and finance, while less affluent users arrive through protest-oriented and climate movement spaces. By comparing these two issue domains, the study shows that sociodemographic sorting does not operate uniformly across polarized topics. Instead, distinct demographic groups build their own paths, shaping both the routes through which they engage with political content and the informational ecosystems that sustain their engagement. Our approach, based on the attention-flow graph, refines our understanding of how different groups become embedded in online political communities.