Workshop Proceedings of the 20th International
AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media
Workshop: SocialLLM: Large Language Models for Social Reasoning and Simulation
DOI: 10.36190/2026.70Understanding how online communities discuss and make sense of complex social issues is a central challenge in social media research, yet existing tools for large-scale discourse analysis are often closed-source, difficult to adapt, or limited to single analytical views. We present SocialPulse, an open-source subreddit sensemaking toolkit that unifies multiple complementary analyses - topic modeling, LLM-powered summarization and multi-modal content analysis, sentiment analysis, user activity characterization, and bot detection - within a single interactive system. SocialPulse enables users to fluidly move between aggregate trends and fine-grained content, compare highly active and long-tail contributors, and examine temporal shifts in discourse across subreddits. This work presents end-to-end exploratory workflows that allow researchers and practitioners to rapidly surface themes, participation patterns, and emerging dynamics in large Reddit datasets. A case study using SocialPulse highlights how exploratory analysis of the r/conspiracy subreddit can reveal findings on topic-dependent sentiment patterns, temporal variation in community engagement, and cross-community content duplication with other subreddits such as r/politics. By offering an extensible and openly available platform, SocialPulse provides a practical and reusable foundation for transparent, reproducible sensemaking of online community discourse.