Pawel Sobkowicz

Negative emotions boost user activity at BBC forum

We present an empirical study of user activity in online BBC discussion forums, measured by the number of posts written by individual debaters and the average sentiment of these posts. Nearly 2.5 million posts from over 18 thousand users were investigated. Scale-free distributions were observed for activity in individual discussion threads as well as for overall activity. The number of unique users in a thread normalized by the thread length decays with thread length, suggesting that thread life is sustained by mutual discussions rather than by independent comments. Automatic sentiment analysis shows that most posts contain negative emotions and the most active users in individual threads express predominantly negative sentiments. It follows that the average emotion of longer threads is more negative and that threads can be sustained by negative comments. An agent-based computer simulation model has been used to reproduce several essential characteristics of the analyzed system. The model stresses the role of discussions between users, especially emotionally laden quarrels between supporters of opposite opinions, and represents many observed statistics of the forum.

Dynamics of hate based Internet user networks

We present a study of the properties of network of political discussions on one of the most popular Polish Internet forums. This provides the opportunity to study the computer mediated human interactions in strongly bipolar environment. The comments of the participants are found to be mostly disagreements, with strong percentage of invective and provocative ones. Binary exchanges (quarrels) play significant role in the network growth and topology. Statistical analysis shows that the growth of the discussions depends on the degree of controversy of the subject and the intensity of personal conflict between the participants. This is in contrast to most previously studied social networks, for example networks of scientific citations, where the nature of the links is much more positive and based on similarity and collaboration rather than opposition and abuse. The work discusses also the implications of the findings for more general studies of consensus formation, where our observations of increased conflict contradict the usual assumptions that interactions between people lead to averaging of opinions and agreement.

Two-Year Study of Emotion and Communication Patterns in a Highly Polarized Political Discussion Forum

The article presents analysis of a Polish Internet political discussion forum, characterized by significant polarization and high levels of emotion. The study compares samples of discussions gathered at three periods during a 2-year time, during which events occurred that significantly increased the already strong political division of Polish society (the sudden death of the President in a plane crash, snap elections, accusations of assassination and treason). Despite these circumstances, we observe a remarkable stability of individual political support. Extensive discussions among the forum users did not lead to changes in their political affiliations or specific opinions. In contrast, emotions expressed by the forum users, mainly negative, were found to vary from post to post and between the discussion threads. An automatic emotion recognition algorithm is presented, giving results closely corresponding to human evaluations. The authors also show that differences in a user interface between the two alternative forum webpages, especially effects of features promoting direct one-to-one communication, have significant impact on message content and decrease negative emotions. Implications of such changes on promoting communication across a political divide are discussed.

Lognormal distributions of user post lengths in Internet discussions - a consequence of the Weber-Fechner law?

The paper presents an analysis of the length of comments posted in Internet discussion fora, based on a collection of large datasets from several sources. We found that despite differences in the forum language, the discussed topics and user emotions, the comment length distributions are very regular and described by the lognormal form with a very high precision. We discuss possible origins of this regularity and the existence of a universal mechanism deciding the length of the user posts. We suggest that the observed lognormal dependence may be due to an entropy maximizing combination of two psychological factors which are perceived on a non-linear, logarithmic scale in accordance with the Weber-Fechner law, namely the time spent on post related considerations and the comment length itself. This hypothesis is supported by an experimental check of text length recognition capacity, confirming proportionality of the ‘just noticeable differences’ for text lengths - the basis of the Weber-Fechner law.

How Online Emotions Influence Community Life

Emotions expressed online as well as individual activities are usually far from equilibrium. In such a setting, the non-stationarity can be understood. As a condition necessary for discussion to be started and ceased. We demonstrate non-equilibrium stages of expressed emotions that are relaxed during the community life. To tackle this problem we propose two approaches—first that is based on the observation of activity in online threads and on relations between a thread length and emotions included in it and the second that introduces entropy as an indicator of dialogue’s forthcoming closing. Both concepts express the same key condition: a necessity of an emotional imbalance for the discussion to last. We introduce models, designed to copy stylized facts observed in the datasets: power-law distributions of discussion lengths or activity as well as relations between emotions and duration of the thread.