Political discussion in non-political online communities is more likely to see policy opinion expression

It seems natural to think that online political discussion happens in political spaces: comment sections under news articles, campaign pages, partisan forums, or video-sharing communities built around elections and public affairs.

But anyone who spends time online knows that politics does not stay neatly contained in those spaces. It shows up in local forums, hobby groups, gaming communities, entertainment discussions, and personal social media feeds. A conversation that begins with everyday life can suddenly become a debate about policy, rights, or government.

Communication scholars call this incidental political discussion: political talk that emerges in spaces not primarily organized around politics. Our research team were interested in a simple question: what happens when people talk about politics in non-political online communities?

A common expectation in political communication research is that these conversations might be less polarized and more civil than political talk in explicitly political spaces. The logic makes sense: In non-political communities, people may not arrive with partisan identities already activated. They may also be guided by community norms built around shared interests, local concerns, or social connection rather than political conflict.

In other words, we are supposed to expect political talk in non-political spaces to be less polarized, and perhaps less uncivil.

We wanted to test whether that was actually the case in real-word digital communities. To do so, we (Yibin Fan, Benjamin Mako Hill, and Patricia Moy) examined Reddit discussions about mass shootings and gun control in October 2017. Sampling from over 100 thousand comments on gun control issue across the whole platform within that month, we compared comments from 15 explicitly political communities with comments from 15 non-political communities, including culture-, location-, and game-based ones, in addition to others.

The results surprised us. As the figure below from our study shows, policy opinion expression was, on average, more common in non-political communities than in political ones. Several non-political subreddits—including r/Wisconsin, r/Christianity, r/videos, and r/funny—had especially high levels of policy opinion expression; in total, 10 non-political subreddits had policy opinions in more than half of the sampled comments. By contrast, only three political subreddits—r/progun, r/ShitGunControllersSay, and r/Political_Revolution—crossed the same 50% threshold. This pattern suggests that policy talk is not confined to explicitly political spaces; in some cases, it appears even more frequently in communities organized around local life, religion, entertainment, or humor.

Statistical test results are here. After accounting for a range of factors in our regression model, comments in non-political communities were more likely to contain a clear policy opinion than comments in explicitly political communities. The model estimated that the predicted probability of expressing a clear policy position was about 34% in political communities, compared with 51% in non-political communities. This difference was statistically significant.

At the same time, we found no significant difference in incivility between political and non-political communities.

This combination of findings was especially interesting, and contrary to what’s mostly reported in current social science literature on digital political communication. When political issues appeared in non-political spaces, people were more likely to state a clear policy position, and not necessarily more civil in discussion. This challenges a common way of thinking about political discussion in such a polarized digital world.

One possible explanation is that participants in explicitly political communities are often immersed in ongoing political debate. Their comments may include detailed argumentation, interpretation, irony, criticism of political actors, or discussion of the news cycle without always stating a clear policy position. By contrast, when a major political issue enters a non-political community, participants may be more likely to be freshly exposed to this issue, and react by saying what they think should be done.

Another explanation for incivility is that Reddit’s community-based moderation matters. Many communities, political and non-political alike, rely on rules, moderators, and shared expectations that can limit openly uncivil behavior. This helps explain why we did not find a significant difference in incivility and both types of communities see a low level (around 6% of sample) of uncivil comments.

The broader lesson is that political communication does not only happen where politics is expected. It also happens in the ordinary spaces of digital life, where people gather to talk about games, cities, hobbies, entertainment, or shared interests. If we want to understand democracy online, we need to pay attention not only to where people go to talk about politics, but also to where politics shows up uninvited.

This work was published in New Media & Society: Fan, Y., Hill, B. M., & Moy, P. (2026). “Unintended politics: Opinion expression and incivility in incidental political discussion.” New Media & Society.

Note: This work started as my (Yibin Fan) master thesis work at Univeristy of Washington. Thanks to the committee: Benjamin Mako Hill, Patricia Moy, and Yuan Hsiao.