Words as Trigger Points in Social Media Discussions

Trigger points are a concept introduced by Mau, Lux, and Westheuser (2023) to study qualitative focus group interviews and understand polarisation in Germany. When people communicate, 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 react affectively to such triggers and show strong and negative emotional responses. In this paper, we introduce the first systematic study of the large-scale effect of individual words as trigger points by analysing a large amount of social media posts. We examine online deliberations on Reddit between 2020 and 2022 and collect >100 million posts from subreddits related to a set of words identified as trigger points in UK politics. We find that such trigger words affect user engagement and have noticeable consequences on animosity in online discussions. We share empirical evidence of trigger words causing animosity, and how they provide incentives for hate speech, adversarial debates, and disagreements. Our work is the first to introduce trigger points to computational studies of online communication. Our findings are relevant to researchers interested in online harms and who examine how citizens debate politics and society in light of affective polarisation.