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This longitudinal study examines the evolution of political discourse about the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) among users from primarily US-focused subreddits, as reflected in Reddit discussions between 2015 and 2023. Social media interactions, characterized by anonymity and performativity, can help differentiate between authentic perspectives and misinformation. With its diverse user base and wide-ranging discussions, Reddit provides a valuable data source for analyzing public sentiment. To explore changes in discourse, we investigated linguistic features such as clout, authenticity, emotional expression, and analytical thinking. We used Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis (CMDA) and Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) software to conduct qualitative content analysis and quantitative goodness-of-fit tests. Analytical thinking reflects how systematically users present political arguments, while clout captures the confidence and authority of discourse, highlighting dominant voices. Authenticity measures the sincerity of discourse, and emotional tone reveals users’ feelings toward KSA. Our findings show an overall increase in analytical discourse and a decrease in negative tone, although emotional sentiment remained largely negative. Peaks in clout, authenticity, and emotional tone corresponded to major political events, indicating how such events shape public attitudes. These results suggest that significant political and social events influence both the content and tone of political discourse and may, in turn, impact public perceptions and emotions.

This study explores how male and female users of Voicethread.com, an interactive multimodal web 2.0 platform that allows asynchronous commenting via text, audio, and video, communicate and perform identity through self-expression in different semiotic modes. A quantitative computer-mediated discourse analysis of three public English-language Voicethreads found that in video and audio comments, both genders express more positive attitudes; they are also more self-conscious and ego-focused. The text comments express more neutral and negative attitudes, especially when written by males, but they are also more socially interactive. With few exceptions, female communication patterns resemble those for audio and video, while male communication patterns resemble those for text. We propose explanations for these findings and discuss their implications for identity performances in interactive multimodal environments.

Research is scarce on how direct and indirect support seeking strategies affect support exchange in online health communities. Moreover, prior research has relied mostly on content analysis of forum posts at the post level. In order to generate a more fine-grained analysis of support exchange, we conducted content analysis at the utterance level, taking directness of support seeking, quality of provision, forum type, and seeker gender into account. Our analysis of four popular online support forums for people living with human immunodeficiency virus found that type of support sought and provided, support seeking strategy, and quality of emotional support provision differed in care provider/formal forums versus social/informal forums. Interestingly, indirect support seeking tended to elicit more supportive emotional responses than direct support seeking strategies in all forums; we account for this in terms of type of support sought. Practical implications for online support communities are discussed.