Anger Breeds Controversy: Analyzing Controversy and Emotions on Reddit
This research addresses the problem of understanding and managing online social conflicts for online communities, though it is incremental in applying emotion detection to existing controversy analysis.
The study analyzed how emotions, particularly anger, correlate with controversy in Reddit discussions, finding that controversial comments express more anger and less positive emotions, influence downstream emotional dynamics, and improve prediction of controversial comments.
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 explored. To address this gap, we study controversy on Reddit, a popular network of online discussion forums. We collect discussions from a wide variety of topical forums and use emotion detection to recognize a range of emotions from text, including anger, fear, joy, admiration, etc. Our study has three main findings. First, controversial comments express more anger and less admiration, joy and optimism than non-controversial comments. Second, controversial comments affect emotions of downstream comments in a discussion, usually resulting in long-term increase in anger and a decrease in positive emotions, although the magnitude and direction of emotional change depends on the forum. Finally, we show that emotions help better predict which comments will become controversial. Understanding emotional dynamics of online discussions can help communities to better manage conversations.