Cross-Platform Polarization: Stance Tracking of Donald Trump Discourse (Reddit vs. YouTube)

• December, 2025

We built an end-to-end stance tracking pipeline to measure political polarization by classifying comments as anti-Trump, neutral, or pro-Trump across two platforms and time periods: a historical Reddit baseline (r/worldnews, 2016–2017) and current YouTube comments collected via the YouTube Data API. We manually annotated a small stance dataset (300 Reddit comments) and fine-tuned a RoBERTa-based transformer to produce both discrete stance labels and a continuous stance score (from model probabilities). Finally, we deployed an interactive Streamlit dashboard that compares stance distributions, visualizes Reddit’s weekly stance trends, and analyzes how engagement (upvotes/likes) relates to stance across platforms.