Replication materials for The Character of Connection: Platform Affordances and Connective Democracy. Sarah Shugars and Eunbin Ha, Social Media + Society, (2025). https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051251332427

Anonymized data for this study can be found at https://sarahshugars.com/connectiveDemocracy_data.zip

Code for this paper are organized into subfolders based on the steps in the analysis pipeline. See each folder for more details on that particular element.

0_seed_posts Scripts for original (seed) post collection based on keyword search for both Twitter and Reddit.

1_conversation_retrieval Scripts for sampling seed posts and retrieving full conversations for both Twitter and Reddit, as well as scripts for initial pre-processing of those posts.

2_computationalAnalysis Scripts for calculating toxicity (requires API), topic model, and general statistics about conversation structure.

3_classification Classification of conversations into relevant topical areas.

4_analysis Final analysis, creation of figures, and calculation of summary statistics.