How people talk about armed conflicts

Armed conflicts around the world produce displacement, injury, and death. This study examines how anonymous and pseudonymous Internet commenters discuss such conflicts. Specifically, we ask how permissible it is to express positive or negative sentiments about these conflicts as a function of variables including region, conflict nature, and severity. Data from the Armed Conflicts Database is aggregated to identify a number of potential factors that may influence views on acceptable sentiments. We used sentiment analysis to code a large-scale sample of the Reddit corpus. We judged permissibility using the Reddit voting features. This revealed that positive sentiments are found not permissible for higher numbers of fatalities, and that negative sentiments are found to be more permissible for certain regions and older conflicts, but less permissible for territorial conflicts. Thus, this study provides evidence that many features help construct public perception of a conflict.