Social tectonics: Rapid organization of online COVID communities

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a large topic of interest on social media, with many different online communities addressing different dimensions of it. However, it differs from many other topics of comparable scale and complexity in that it appeared abruptly, over a short span of time for a topic of its size, and the online communities addressing it formed in a similarly short amount of time. We study the effects of this rapid self-organization using data on a nearly comprehensive set of COVID communities from Reddit, both as a substantive question about COVID discussions in themselves, and as a more general question about the form that the rapid self-assembly of several hundred online communities takes on a common overarching topic. Among our findings, we observe ways in which the newly-formed communities intersect with existing topical frames, including those around political, skeptic, and geographic organization. The effect of location was particularly strong, and geography formed the largest organizing theme in the communities, despite the global nature of the crisis. Overall, our work addresses questions in three aspects: what were people talking about, who were they talking about it with, and how did they self-organize these conversations?