# The geometry of online conversations and the causal antecedents of conflictual discourse

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.15600 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.15600/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Feb 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Large Language Models for Data Annotation and Synthesis: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13446/) (2024)
- [A Computational Approach to Politeness with Application to Social Factors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.6078/) (2013)
- [Conversations Gone Awry: Detecting Early Signs of Conversational Failure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.05345/) (2018)
- [Towards Human-AI Deliberation: Design and Evaluation of LLM-Empowered Deliberative AI for AI-Assisted Decision-Making](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16812/) (2024)
- [Before Name-calling: Dynamics and Triggers of Ad Hominem Fallacies in Web Argumentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.06613/) (2018)
- [A systematic review of Hate Speech automatic detection using Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00742/) (2021)
- [Positioning Political Texts with Large Language Models by Asking and Averaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16639/) (2023)
- [Measuring Emotional Contagion in Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.06021/) (2015)
- [Evaluation and Facilitation of Online Discussions in the LLM Era: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01513/) (2025)
- [A Piece of My Mind: A Sentiment Analysis Approach for Online Dispute Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05704/) (2016)
- [Toxicity Ahead: Forecasting Conversational Derailment on GitHub](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.15031/) (2025)
- [Dimensions of Online Conflict: Towards Modeling Agonism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03584/) (2023)
- [Dynamics of Disagreement: Large-Scale Temporal Network Analysis Reveals Negative Interactions in Online Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.01652/) (2016)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This article investigates the causal antecedents of conflictual language and the geometry of interaction in online threaded conversations related to climate change. We employ three annotation dimensions, inferred through LLM prompting and averaging, to capture complementary aspects of discursive conflict (such as stance: agreement vs disagreement; tone: attacking vs respectful; and emotional versus factual framing) and use data from a threaded online forum to examine how these dimensions respond to temporal, conversational, and arborescent structural features of discussions. We show that, as suggested by the literature, longer delays between successive posts in a thread are associated with replies that are, on average, more respectful, whereas longer delays relative to the parent post are associated with slightly less disagreement but more emotional (less factual) language. Second, we characterize alignment with the local conversational environment and find strong convergence both toward the average stance, tone and emotional framing of older sibling posts replying to the same parent and toward those of the parent post itself, with parent post effects generally stronger than sibling effects. We further show that early branch-level responses condition these alignment dynamics, such that parent-child stance alignment is amplified or attenuated depending on whether a branch is initiated in agreement or disagreement with the discussion's root message. These influences are largely additive for civility-related dimensions (attacking vs respectful, disagree vs agree), whereas for emotional versus factual framing there is a significant interaction: alignment with the parent's emotionality is amplified when older siblings are similarly aligned.