The spreading and promotion of controversial content support the polarization of social networks, especially in the political sphere. Controversiality of content is one feature that could draw attention to that content. There is active research into polarization on online social networks. However, this openness formed a platform for the polarization of opinions and controversial discussions. Much of this activity is benign or even positive. The emergence of online social networks opened the door for many to amplify content freely. Understanding this phenomenon would shed light on how users or organization might use it to their help in controlling and spreading a specific beneficiary message. From the comparative analyses conducted, controversial content travels faster and further from its origin. We used data collected from Reddit consisting of around 17 million posts and their corresponding comments related to cybersecurity issues to answer these emerging questions. This work asks whether controversially initiated information cascades have distinctive characteristics than those not controversial in Reddit. On the contrary, we examine typical cascades with comments that the readers deemed to be controversial concerning the matter discussed. The difference between this study and previous attempts at understanding controversiality on social networks is that we do not investigate topics that are known to be controversial. The online social network platform Reddit has the feature to tag comments as controversial if the users have mixed opinions about that comment. It is known that controversiality is bound to happen within online discussions. Among the many interesting behaviors, controversiality within social cascades is of high interest to us. The abundance of information shared over these networks makes them an attractive area for investigating all aspects of human behavior on information dissemination. Facebook, Twitter, Reddit are among many other networks where users can have this freedom of information sharing. Online users discuss and converse about all sorts of topics on social networks.
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