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This book offers a comprehensive scholarly overview of Reddit, one of the most popular and least studied social platforms of the early 21st century. The book inspires new ways of thinking about Reddit, considering it from multiple perspectives: through a historical lens, as a site where identity is forged, as a democracy, as a community, and as a news aggregator and distributor. By bringing theories from computer-mediated communication, communication studies, and sociology to bear on original, large-scale observational analyses of Reddit's communities, this book provides a uniquely comprehensive overview of the platform's first 15 years. Understanding Reddit will help us make sense of how rapidly growing communities function in an era of mass online anonymity. Serving both as a primer on how social behavior on Reddit plays out, and as a way of locating it within multiple theoretical traditions, the book will offer important insights to scholars and students in the disciplines of communication, media studies, information science, internet and emerging media studies, and sociology.

Internet trolls live to upset as many people as possible, using all the technical and psychological tools at their disposal. They gleefully whip the media into a frenzy over a fake teen drug crisis; they post offensive messages on Facebook memorial pages, traumatizing grief-stricken friends and family; they use unabashedly racist language and images. They take pleasure in ruining a complete stranger's day and find amusement in their victim's anguish. In short, trolling is the obstacle to a kinder, gentler Internet. To quote a famous Internet meme, trolling is why we can't have nice things online. Or at least that's what we have been led to believe. In this provocative book, Whitney Phillips argues that trolling, widely condemned as obscene and deviant, actually fits comfortably within the contemporary media landscape. Trolling may be obscene, but, Phillips argues, it isn't all that deviant. Trolls' actions are born of and fueled by culturally sanctioned impulses -- which are just as damaging as the trolls' most disruptive behaviors. Phillips describes, for example, the relationship between trolling and sensationalist corporate media -- pointing out that for trolls, exploitation is a leisure activity; for media, it's a business strategy. She shows how trolls, \"the grimacing poster children for a socially networked world,\" align with social media. And she documents how trolls, in addition to parroting media tropes, also offer a grotesque pantomime of dominant cultural tropes, including gendered notions of dominance and success and an ideology of entitlement. We don't just have a trolling problem, Phillips argues; we have a culture problem.This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Thingsisn't only about trolls; it's about a culture in which trolls thrive.

As a remedy against fake news on social media, we examine the effectiveness of three different mechanisms for source ratings that can be applied to articles when they are initially published: expert rating (where expert reviewers fact-check articles, which are aggregated to provide a source rating), user article rating (where users rate articles, which are aggregated to provide a source rating), and user source rating (where users rate the sources themselves). We conducted two experiments and found that source ratings influenced social media users' beliefs in the articles and that the rating mechanisms behind the ratings mattered. Low ratings, which would mark the usual culprits in spreading fake news, had stronger effects than did high ratings. When the ratings were low, users paid more attention to the rating mechanism, and, overall, expert ratings and user article ratings had stronger effects than did user source ratings. We also noticed a second-order effect, where ratings on some sources led users to be more skeptical of sources without ratings, even with instructions to the contrary. A user's belief in an article, in turn, influenced the extent to which users would engage with the article (e.g., read, like, comment and share). Lastly, we found confirmation bias to be prominent; users were more likely to believe - and spread - articles that aligned with their beliefs. Overall, our results show that source rating is a viable measure against fake news and propose how the rating mechanism should be designed.

Western European Populist Radical Right Parties (PRRPs) have addressed the dispersed socio-economic status of their electorates by blurring their economic positioning. This contribution analyses the rise of the German PRRP Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) between 2013 and 2017 and the role of its economic policy platform. In contrast to its European peers, the AfD shows few signs of economic strategy blurring. The party offers clear antiredistribution policies that are matched by AfD voters' preferences: even the least affluent AfD supporters have stronger preferences for lower redistribution than the most affluent non-AfD supporters. For AfD supporters with lower socio-economic positions this means that they support economic policies that are against their economic interests. Extreme authoritarian cultural policies spiced up with criticism of the establishment and combined with a general opposition to redistribution can be identified as the AfD's winning formula. Within the Western European PRRP party family, this winning formula directed at supporters with lower socioeconomic positions constitutes an exception.