When Words Divide: Diachronic Ideological Polarization in Political Discourse on Social Media
Political polarization has become a defining feature of online discourse, yet its long-term evolution remains poorly understood. We present a longitudinal analysis of ideological polarization in Reddit discussions by measuring semantic differences in the language used by opposing political communities. We construct temporally aligned community-specific word embeddings and quantify ideological polarization as the semantic divergence of political concepts over time. Our analysis shows that ideological polarization has increased substantially during the study period, both at the concept- and topic-level. Unlike prior computational work, which has largely focused on cross-sectional analyses o...
| Authors | Roy Yitzchak, Noa Lavie, Ella Rabinovich |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 2 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 8 August 2026 |
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