Patterns of linguistic simplification on social media platforms over time.

ABSTRACT: 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 over time. Our findings reveal consistent patterns of complexity across social media platforms and topics, characterized by a nearly universal reduction in te

SUBMITTER: Di Marco N 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11648899 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature