Abstract

Emotions play an important role in interpersonal interactions and social conflict, yet their function in the development of controversy and disagreement in online conversations has not been fully explored. To address this gap, we study controversy on Reddit, a popular network of online discussion forums. We collect discussions from various topical forums and use emotion detection to recognize a range of emotions from text, including anger, fear, joy, admiration, etc. (Code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/ChenK7166/controversy-emotion). We find controversial comments express more anger and less admiration, joy, and optimism than non-controversial comments. Moreover, controversial comments affect emotions of downstream comments, resulting in a long-term increase in anger and a decrease in positive emotions. The magnitude and direction of emotional change differ by forum. Finally …

Date

September 16, 2023

Authors

Kai Chen, Zihao He, Rong-Ching Chang, Jonathan May, Kristina Lerman

Book

International conference on social computing, behavioral-cultural modeling and prediction and behavior representation in modeling and simulation

Pages

44-53

Publisher

Springer Nature Switzerland