We explored the political conversation on Reddit, specifically the largest Canadian subreddit, r/Canada, in the days leading up to the federal election being called. Reddit has long been one of the most used platforms among Canadians, but recent changes to the online news landscape in Canada (particularly the Meta news ban) has made Reddit a particularly important platform for Canadian civic engagement. It is arguably the premier platform for linking to, sharing, and discussing print news - and so an important place to explore in order to understand the tenor of online election-related conversation.
We monitored the most recent 494 Reddit posts on r/Canada, including 87,195 comments and replies made between March 18, 2025 at 00:00 ET and March 23, 2025 at 23:59 ET. This period encompasses the days leading up to and including the date the federal election was called.
During the period we monitored, over 20,000 different users made comments on r/Canada. However, only a small proportion of users were highly active, giving them an outsized presence in these discussion spaces. In fact, we found that the 150 most active commenters on r/Canada made up at least 14% of all comments. Their influence could have been more pronounced given that:
We label these highly active users “power users.”
Power users aren’t necessarily a negative thing, but if their engagement is unproductive or intentionally manipulative, they could be skewing online discussions to shift narratives and public opinion, or to spread disinformation. Information threats could take the form of:
In online spaces like Reddit where a small group of users can have an outsized influence simply by posting more frequently than other users, these information threats are particularly pronounced.
On Reddit, users can both comment on posts and post entirely new material, called a submission.
During our monitoring period, we found that power users equally dominated posting behaviours. We found that:
This is significant because Reddit is a public forum where the majority of people aren't submitting posts or commenting; they are specifically on the subreddit to read other user-generated content. The fact that so few users account for such a high percentage of submissions means that a very small group of people have a lot of power to shape the conversation.
We are not suggesting that r/Canada should be taking any specific actions to limit how much or how often users can post content. Many of these power users likely keep discussion flowing by consistently sharing breaking news articles and spurring discussion, in the process boosting overall engagement to the subreddit in a positive way. However, Canadians should be aware that discussions in these spaces are constructed around a very small group of Reddit users and that there is potential for manipulation as a result.
Reddit is far from the only platform that is susceptible to information threats in this way - our past research found that Twitter (now called “X”) had similar rates of outsized influence among power users.
Although our findings about power users and collective engagement on Reddit mirror our past findings on Twitter, our Reddit findings regarding abusive engagement differ in some respects.
Among this dataset we found that out of 87,195 total comments and replies, only 2,943 were found to be abusive by our machine learning analysis (learn more about our methodology here). This is 3.3% of all comments and replies.
In our past research on Twitter/X, we identified the presence of what we call “power abusers” - users that publish an outsized amount of abusive content. We did not find a culture of power abusers in our dataset. Instead, our findings show:
This is not to say that power abusers do not exist or are not common on Reddit. It’s possible that abusive behaviour simply didn’t happen during this period, but happens commonly in other moments.
Reddit differs from other social media platforms - it is a largely community moderated platform. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok, by contrast, are largely moderated by the platform owners via automated systems, user reports flagging content, and some human moderation. Many of these platforms have also slashed their Trust and Safety initiatives in recent years. It’s possible that significant portions of the abusive content that occurred on r/Canada during this period were removed by moderators or were deleted by the users who posted said content; removed/deleted content made up 2% of comments and replies. In other words, power abusers may have been present on r/Canada, but moderation efforts successfully removed their content or comments.
This potential for moderators to be responsive to removing abusive or rule-breaking comments and content is a significant advantage Reddit has regarding content moderation and user safety.
However, astroturfing, foreign interference, and the spread of disinformation or information manipulation can all occur on social media without triggering an “abusive” label. Although conducting this type of analysis is challenging due to limited access to tools and data that could help pinpoint information threats, over the coming weeks our goal is to identify whether information manipulation is occurring on these platforms and, if so, where it's happening. Stay tuned!
Although the largest, r/Canada cannot represent the full breadth of conversations about Canadian politics, news, or civic engagement on the Reddit platform. Provincially or locally focused subreddits (like r/Alberta and r/Quebec, or r/Toronto and r/Halifax) focus on specific regions of Canada. Places like r/onguardforthee or r/CanadianPolitics host discussions similar to r/Canada with different communities, moderation teams, rules, and audiences. Other subreddits like r/AskCanada, r/canadahousing, or r/ImmigrationCanada are examples of Canadian subreddits that serve specific purposes. And Canadian issues and topics get posted all over subreddits with non-Canadian specific focuses like r/worldnews or r/technology.
r/Canada is a bilingual subreddit, and publishes its rules in both English and French. For those unfamiliar with Reddit, each subreddit is run by different teams of moderators, and thus each subreddit has different rules that are enforced by those respective moderation teams in addition to having to follow the general Reddit rules that apply to all content on the platform. These subreddit-specific rules restrict what kind of content is allowed and how it should be shared, as well as how users should treat each other. On r/Canada there is a full list of rules that structure the conversation and shape the moderation practices on the subreddit.
The existence of these bespoke rules for r/Canada shows how platforms like Reddit provide more tools to the class of users that exist between users and platform owners, moderators and group owners. This allows the platform to be potentially more responsive to abuse than platforms that have different structures and rely on top-down or centralized forms of moderation. Additionally, the subreddit has a number of “installed apps”, some of which aim to reduce information threats and manipulation, such as the “manipulation detector” which alerts moderators about when potential vote manipulation is occurring. These are additional tools that moderators have at their disposal to attempt to limit harmful or manipulative behaviour within r/Canada.
This structure is imperfect, however. Whoever stakes their claim over a creating a subreddit first (many of which were created well over a decade ago now) has ownership over that subreddit until they relinquish it to another user/group, or if Reddit admins step in and force an ownership change (typically only done in cases where moderators were permitting their users to break Reddit’s terms of service/the law or breaking them themselves). This raises questions about the significant editorial control that subreddit owners and moderators have over spaces like r/Canada - being unelected but holding significant power.
r/Canada in particular has been accused of having a moderation team that had ties to other, hate-focused subreddits in the past. r/onguardforthee is a similar subreddit to r/Canada that was created in 2017 by a then r/Canada user who believed that racist users on r/Canada were not being banned effectively and were instead being protected. r/onguardforthee currently has over 301,000 members and acts as a more politically left or progressive-leaning version of r/Canada with different rules and moderation teams, made up in part by users who disagree with r/Canada’s operation and/or reportedly feel that r/Canada is too right-leaning in its moderation.
Despite these issues, shortcomings, and fracturing of communities, spaces like Reddit have the capacity for more community moderation and influence, bespoke rule-making, and autonomy within a greater platform structure. Compared to spaces like Facebook, where moderators have significantly less tools and abilities to detect harm, abuse, and manipulation, Reddit groups have the ability to be governed by the people who actually use them. Much can be done to make specific subreddits and the Reddit platform as a whole more democratic and prosocial (we’ll explore how in future reports - stay tuned).
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