Anger Breeds Controversy: Analyzing Controversy and Emotions on Reddit

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

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, we show that emotions help better predict which comments will become controversial. Understanding the dynamics of emotions in online discussions can help communities to manage conversations better.