Patterns of linguistic simplification on social media platforms over time

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Di Marco, N.; Loru, Edoardo; Bonetti, Anita; Serra, Alessandra Olga Grazia; Cinelli, Matteo; Quattrociocchi, Walter; Fiske, Susan
• 署名单位: Sapienza University Rome; Sapienza University Rome; Tuscia University
• 刊物名称: PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0027-13632
• DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2412105121
• 发表日期: 2024-12-10
• 关键词: political news

摘要

Understanding the impact of digital platforms on user behavior presents foundational challenges, including issues related to polarization, misinformation dynamics, and variation in news consumption. Comparative analyses across platforms and over different years can provide critical insights into these phenomena. This study investigates the linguistic characteristics of user comments over 34 y, focusing on their complexity and temporal shifts. Using a dataset of approximately 300 million English comments from eight diverse platforms and topics, we examine user communications' vocabulary size and linguistic richness and their evolution overtime. Our findings reveal consistent patterns of complexity across social media platforms and topics, characterized by a nearly universal reduction in text length, diminished lexical richness, and decreased repetitiveness. Despite these trends, users consistently introduce new words into their comments at a nearly constant rate. This analysis underscores that platforms only partially influence the complexity of user comments but, instead, it reflects a broader pattern of linguistic change driven by social triggers, suggesting intrinsic tendencies in users' online interactions comparable to historically recognized linguistic hybridization and contamination processes.