Empathy Practices in Social Media Discourse: A Multidimensional and Relational Perspective
Honourable Mention DOI PDF[PLACEHOLDER: Annotations to be written for each theme.]
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Reveals how empathy operates differently across platform architectures by comparing Reddit and Stack Exchange communities with matched topics. What counts as appropriate empathetic response is shaped by platform norms and affordances — efficiency-driven spaces may treat emotional support as noise, while support-oriented spaces structurally mandate it. Challenges the assumption that more empathy is universally desirable in platform design.
Develops a fine-grained annotation framework grounded in psychological theory that distinguishes six empathy-seeking and seven empathy-giving practices in online discourse, moving beyond binary or unidimensional empathy labels. Fine-tunes language models to detect these practices reliably, then applies them at scale across six communities, demonstrating a replicable pipeline from qualitative codebook development to large-scale computational analysis.