The comment sections of online newspapers are an important space to indulge in political discussions and discuss various opinions. These discussion forums have to be moderated due to the misuse by spammers, haters, trolls, and means of propaganda. This moderation process is very expensive and many online news providers have discontinued their comment sections. With more and more political campaigning, or even agitation being distributed over the internet, serious and safe platforms to discuss political topics are increasingly important.
In this project, we therefore analyze comments, users, and articles to understand the dynamics, the information flow, and the interactions in the comment sections. We work on detecting inappropriate comments, predicting popular news topics, identifying fake news and recommending information. Source code and datasets are available here.