View website at: https://reddit-political-analysis.netlify.app/
Political divide has taken a significant hold of social media. Dangerous echo chambers develop in the advent of an ability to detect them. r/The_Donald was a 790,000-user right-wing subreddit that became a haven for its followers before it was banned for racism and harassment in June 2020 from the platform Reddit.
This project aimed to develop a machine learning model to classify the political orientation of Reddit's commentary and communities, build a full-stack application that enables interaction with the model and live data. Facilitating users to understand further how the platform works through identifying echo chambers and political safe havens in the wake of the presidential election.
The dissertation discusses the successful process of building the full-stack application, including extraction of meaningful data, overcoming over-fitting in pre-trained language models, creating a backend to host the model in the cloud, and a frontend that enables the visualisation of these components.
