Dimensions of Online Conflict: Towards Modeling Agonism
Matt Canute Mali Jin hannah holtzclaw Alberto Lusoli Philippa R Adams Mugdha Pandya Maite Taboada Diana Maynard Wendy Hui Kyong Chun
Agonism plays a vital role in democratic dialogue by fostering diverse
perspectives and robust discussions. Within the realm of online conflict there
is another type: hateful antagonism, which undermines constructive dialogue.
Detecting conflict online is central to platform moderation and monetization.
It is also vital for democratic dialogue, but only when it takes the form of
agonism. To model these two types of conflict, we collected Twitter
conversations related to trending controversial topics. We introduce a
comprehensive annotation schema for labelling different dimensions of conflict
in the conversations, such as the source of conflict, the target, and the
rhetorical strategies deployed. Using this schema, we annotated approximately
4,000 conversations with multiple labels. We then trained both logistic
regression and transformer-based models on the dataset, incorporating context
from the conversation, including the number of participants and the structure
of the interactions. Results show that contextual labels are helpful in
identifying conflict and make the models robust to variations in topic. Our
research contributes a conceptualization of different dimensions of conflict, a
richly annotated dataset, and promising results that can contribute to content
moderation.