Sub-Standards and Mal-Practices: Misinformation’s Role in Insular, Polarized, and Toxic Interactions on Reddit

In this work, we examine the influence of unreliable information on political incivility and toxicity on the social media platform Reddit. We show that comments on articles from unreliable news websites are posted more often in right-leaning subreddits and that within individual subreddits, comments, on average, are 32% more likely to be toxic compared to comments on reliable news articles. Using a regression model, we show that these results hold after accounting for partisanship and baseline toxicity rates within individual subreddits. Utilizing a zero-inflated negative binomial regression, we further show that as the toxicity of subreddits increases, users are more likely to comment on posts from known unreliable websites. Finally, modeling user interactions with an exponential random graph model, we show that when reacting to a Reddit submission that links to a website known for spreading unreliable information, users are more likely to be toxic to users of different political beliefs. Our results collectively illustrate that low-quality/unreliable information not only predicts increased toxicity but also polarizing interactions between users of different political orientations.