Into the battlefield: Quantifying and modeling intra-community conflicts in online discussion

Abstract

Over the last decade, online forums have become primary news sources for readers around the globe, and social media platforms are the space where these news forums find most of their audience and engagement. Our particular focus in this paper is to study conflict dynamics over online news articles in Reddit, one of the most popular online discussion platforms. We choose to study how conflicts develop around news inside a discussion community, the r/news subreddit. Mining the characteristics of these engagements often provide useful insights into the behavioral dynamics of large-scale human interactions. Such insights are useful for many reasons - for news houses to improvise their publishing strategies and potential audience, for data analytics to get a better introspection over media engagement as well as for social media platforms to avoid unnecessary and perilous conflicts. In this work, we present a novel quantification of conflict in online discussion. Unlike previous studies on conflict dynamics, which model conflict as a binary phenomenon, our measure is continuous-valued, which we validate with manually annotated ratings. We address a two-way prediction task. Firstly, we predict the probable degree of conflict a news article will face from its audience. We employ multiple machine learning frameworks for this task using various features extracted from news articles. Secondly, given a pair of users and their interaction history, we predict if their future engagement will result in a conflict. We fuse textual and network-based features together using a support vector machine which achieves an AUC of 0.89. Moreover, we implement a graph convolutional model which exploits engagement histories of users to predict whether a pair of users who never met each other before will have a conflicting interaction, with an AUC of 0.69. We perform our studies on a massive discussion dataset crawled from the Reddit news community, containing over 41k news articles and 5.5 million comments. Apart from the prediction tasks, our studies offer interesting insights on the conflict dynamics - how users form clusters based on conflicting engagements, how different is the temporal nature of conflict over different online news forums, how is contribution of different language based features to induce conflict, etc. In short, our study paves the way towards new methods of exploration and modeling of conflict dynamics inside online discussion communities.