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Words as Trigger Points in Social Media Discussions: A Large-Scale Case Study about UK Politics on Reddit

Political debates on social media sometimes flare up. From that moment on, users engage much more with one another; their communication is also more emotional and polarised. While it has been difficult to grasp such moments with computational methods, we suggest that trigger points are a useful concept to understand and ultimately model such behaviour. Established in qualitative focus group interviews to understand political polarisation (Mau, Lux, and Westheuser 2023), trigger points represent moments when individuals feel that their understanding of what is fair, normal, or appropriate in society is questioned. In the original studies, individuals show strong and negative emotional responses when certain triggering words or topics are mentioned. Our paper finds that these trigger points also exist in online debates. We examine online deliberations on Reddit between 2020 and 2022 and collect >100 million comments from subreddits related to a set of words identified as trigger points in UK politics. Analysing the comments, we find that trigger words increase user engagement and animosity, i.e., more negativity, hate speech, and controversial comments. Introducing trigger points to computational studies of online communication, our findings are relevant to researchers interested in affective computing, online deliberation, and how citizens debate politics and society in light of affective polarisation.

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