Political debates on social media often escalate quickly, leading to increased engagement as well as more emotional and polarised exchanges. Trigger points (Mau, Lux, and Westheuser 2023) represent moments when individuals feel that their understanding of what is fair, normal, or appropriate in society is being questioned. Analysing Reddit discussions, we examine how trigger points shape online debates and assess their impact on engagement and affect. Our analysis is based on over 100 million comments from subreddits centred on a predefined set of terms identified as trigger words in UK politics. We find that mentions of these terms are associated with higher engagement and increased animosity, including more controversial, negative, angry, and hateful responses. These results position trigger words as a useful concept for modelling and analysing online polarisation.

翻译：社交媒体上的政治辩论常常迅速升级，导致参与度提高以及更情绪化和两极化的交流。触发点（Mau、Lux和Westheuser，2023）代表个体感到他们对社会公平、常态或适当性的理解受到质疑的时刻。通过分析Reddit讨论，我们研究了触发点如何塑造在线辩论，并评估其对参与度和情感的影响。我们的分析基于超过1亿条评论，这些评论来自围绕一组预定义的、被识别为英国政治中触发词的术语的subreddit。我们发现，提及这些术语与更高的参与度和更强的敌意相关，包括更多争议性、负面、愤怒和仇恨的回应。这些结果表明，触发词是建模和分析在线两极分化的一个有用概念。