How Confederate Monument Controversies Unfold Across Reddit Communities: Topics, Posting Patterns, and Community Responses

Confederate monuments have long stood at the center of public memory controversies in the United States, and social media platforms increasingly shape how these controversies circulate and receive responses. This study examines Confederate monument controversies across five Reddit communities—r/politics, r/news, r/PoliticalDiscussion, r/AskAnAmerican, and r/AskHistorians—using 2379 posts and 117,556 comments. Combining BERTopic modeling, zero-shot classification, and event-based statistical analysis, it investigates temporal patterns, topic structures, post categories, and responses. Discussion rose most sharply around the Charlottesville rally and the George Floyd event window, with peaks in r/politics and r/news. Topic modeling identified nine stable topics across national political debate, local removal actions, legal disputes, legislative processes, and historical interpretation. Among non-news posts, Seeking Information/Opinion was most common (41.9%), followed by Removal/Implementation Update (20.5%), Resource Sharing/Mobilization (18.9%), and Complaint/Normative Condemnation (18.7%). Protest, removal, and legal-conflict topics generated higher comment volumes and scores, whereas historically oriented topics showed lower interaction intensity. Comment sections were dominated by Explanation or Interpretation, indicating that Reddit discussions extended monument controversies mainly through explanation, comparison, and historical analogy rather than interpersonal conflict. The findings show that Reddit reorganizes public memory controversy through platform rules, community norms, and interactional mechanisms. By connecting event peaks, topic structures, post categories, and comment pathways, the study also interprets Reddit-based monument controversy as a platformed media ritual of attention, classification, and public memory negotiation.