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.

翻译：触发点是Mau、Lux和Westheuser（2023）在定性焦点小组访谈研究中引入的概念，用以理解德国的极化现象。当人们交流时，触发点代表个体感到自身对社会中公平、正常或恰当性的理解受到质疑的时刻。在原始研究中，个体对此类触发点产生情感反应，并表现出强烈的负面情绪反应。本文通过对大量社交媒体帖子的分析，首次系统研究了单个词汇作为触发点的宏观效应。我们考察了2020年至2022年间Reddit平台上的在线讨论，从与英国政治中识别出的触发词相关的子论坛中收集了超过1亿条帖子。研究发现，此类触发词会影响用户参与度，并对在线讨论中的敌意产生显著影响。我们提供了触发词引发敌意的实证证据，并展示了其如何助长仇恨言论、对抗性辩论和分歧。我们的工作是首次将触发点概念引入在线交流的计算研究。本研究对关注网络伤害以及考察公民如何在情感极化背景下讨论政治与社会问题的研究者具有参考价值。