About

Online conversations about youth, technology, and parenting happen across fragmented communities- subreddits about parenting, youth culture, technology policy, and online safety rarely overlap, even though the issues are deeply connected. Understanding how (and whether) these communities interact has implications for how information about youth-centered technology policy spreads and whose voices shape the discourse.

Process

I built a computational pipeline to analyze cross-community interaction patterns on Reddit:

• Collected data on 180K+ users and 393K interactions across 40 subreddits using the Pushshift API

• Cleaned and processed the data using Python (pandas) and constructed interaction graphs with NetworkX

• Applied Louvain community detection in Gephi to identify community clusters

• Conducted cross-community composition analysis to map how users move between youth, parenting, and technology subreddits

Impact

Early findings reveal distinct community clusters with limited cross-pollination between parenting-focused and technology-policy-focused subreddits, suggesting that the people making decisions about youth online safety and the people experiencing its effects are talking past each other.

Reflection

This project pushed me into computational territory building data pipelines, working with large-scale API data, debugging graph construction. It also confirmed something I suspected from my qualitative work: the disconnect between policy conversations and lived experience.