Is Reddit biased towards the left?

If you’re an avid Reddit user, I’d be willing to bet that this isn’t the first time you’ve seen this particular topic being brought up. Hell, hardly a day goes by on Reddit without someone or another questioning the political persuasion of its user base. Some people consider Reddit to be a mostly left-leaning website, whereas others dispute that notion and argue that Reddit’s user base is far too multifaceted to be pinned down into one political category. I have my own personal opinions on the subject. I feel that although there might be a lot of Centrists and Conservatives on Reddit, that they are vastly outnumbered by users who consider themselves Liberal or Leftist. But that’s just my personal opinion; and not an actual fact. I will try my best to approach this topic with as little personal bias as possible. So… lets get the ball rolling.

The best place to start is with an unofficial survey that some Reddit users took part in. Since the submission I am about to link to has 492 upvotes (at the time of this post), I am going to guess that the survey was pretty popular at the time. Do note however that I have absolutely no idea how many Reddit users took part in this poll. The submission to Reddit can be found here: Click Here. The title of the submission, which was presumably written by the person who carried out the survey, reads as follows:

Is Reddit really white, male, liberal, athiest, educated and American? Probably. But let’s see what we can figure out.

I tried clicking on the actual link that he/she posted with the submission, but I ended up getting a nasty 404 error. Unfortunately, it seems as if the title is the only thing that infers what the results of this survey were.

Moving on. Let us take a trip to the r/politics section (18th July 11pm GMT 00) on Reddit. Here is a screenshot that I took of the top half of the r/politics section. The r/politics section deals specifically with US-related political news.

The hottest topic is a link to a Youtube video that shows a slideshow of Tea Party signs. The majority of the comments by Reddit users on this post are critical of the Tea Party and their attitudes.

The second hot topic is a post titled “Netanyahu: US easily manipulated – Middle East – Al Jazeera English”. This topic links to an Al Jazeera English news article. The majority of the comments made by Reddit users on this post were critical of Israel and of the US media for not paying attention to the story.

The third topic is a self post (like a forum topic) that is titled “The bush tax cuts account for 40% of our current year deficit. He sold the tax cuts as being simulative to the economy. California unemployment is currently at 12.2%”. The title is obviously critical of former US president George Bush.

The fourth post is titled “Chicago cop who served in Afghanistan and Iraq has warning: Gang members are coming home with military training”. The top comment on this post at the time was:

Then put them out of business by legalizing drugs

The second most upvoted comment at the time was:

I’m more worried about cops coming home with military training.

The fifth hottest topic was titled “Does anyone else really wish Al Gore had been elected?”. The feelings of author of this self post are pretty obvious.

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