Reddit Shaming Karen

Abstract

Online shaming behavior has become much more common due to the widespread adoption of online social media platforms such as Instagram and also large online forums such as Reddit. As a result, there have been various words which have been adapted to mean and represent something completely different than they originally did. This project focuses on one specific term which has shown an increase in popularity over the last decade. Karen is a slang term for an angry, and often racist middle-aged white woman who polices other people’s behaviors. This term has become associated with various physical features and personality traits such as having a blonde bob haircut, rudely asking to speak to managers, and attempting to police other people's behaviors. Unfortunately, there have also been instances of racially motivated actions becoming associated with the word as well. The main goal of this project was to gain an initial understanding of online shaming behavior and also discover potential trends in the usages of the given keyword. As mentioned earlier, Karen will be the associated keyword, although the project will support Dr. Florian Zach with measuring data trends with any keywords he may require. Reddit will act as our sole source of information. Reddit is a social media platform or forum, where unlike other platforms such as Facebook, users gather in given communities (known as subreddits), that discuss whatever the topic of that community is. The motivation for this project stems from a discovery by our client Dr. Zach. He discovered that during 2020, the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, there was an increase in the number of “Karen” occurrences. Our client is interested in why this increase occurred and what the ramifications might be. Useful inferences can be made from the analysis of this phenomenon such as how “Karen” occurrences can be prevented, the main causes of “Karen” events, and more. Our first objective was to first obtain current Reddit data using public APIs. The obtained data was then preprocessed accordingly and stored locally. Our next task was to analyze the data using qualitative analysis in the form of Natural Language Processing (NLP). Some techniques used included noise reduction and removal, stop word removal, and lemmatization. Our resulting steps then provided us with access to a plethora of preprocessed data which in turn allowed various data trends within the specified 36 months to be applied to various graphs and charts for later visual analysis. The completion of this project provided Dr. Zach with access to a plethora of current Reddit data trends related to the keyword “Karen” and will allow both him and future teams to perform numerous types of analyses to study the usage of “Karen”. Additionally, future expansion of this project is promising as our team has allowed for easy adaptability for future students and researchers.