We present an analysis of the properties of a social network, formed by users participating in one of the most popular Polish political discussion forums, gathered at three periods within a two year time, during which events that significantly increased the already strong political division of the Polish society occurred. We find that despite communication is motivated by controversy and negative emotions, the resulting social network is remarkably similar to networks formed in discussion boards based on similarity of views; showing power-law like behavior of user popularity and activity. All collected messages have been analyzed to determine their content type, author's political sympathies and emotion level. An automatic emotion recognition algorithm is presented, giving results closely corresponding to human evaluations. Using the data on reader evaluation of the comments we present estimates of the political sympathies of the `silent majority' of forum readers. The data from the observations are used as the input for an agent based computer simulation model, reproducing many observed characteristics of the forum. We observe a remarkable stability of individual political support. Extensive discussions among the forum users did not lead to changes in their political affiliations or specific opinions. In contrast, emotions expressed by the forum users, mainly negative, were found to vary from post to post and between the discussion threads. We show that differences in a user interface between the two alternative forum Web pages, especially effects of features promoting direct one-to-one communication, have significant impact on message content and decrease negative emotions. Implications of such changes on promoting communication across a political divide are discussed.

• Legal notice:
  

  Copyright (c) Pielaszek Research, all rights reserved.
  The above materials, including auxiliary resources, are subject to Publisher's copyright and the Author(s) intellectual rights. Without limiting Author(s) rights under respective Copyright Transfer Agreement, no part of the above documents may be reproduced without the express written permission of Pielaszek Research, the Publisher. Express permission from the Author(s) is required to use the above materials for academic purposes, such as lectures or scientific presentations.
  In every case, proper references including Author(s) name(s) and URL of this webpage: https://science24.com/paper/25186 must be provided.

1. Breakdown of metastable political duopoly due to asymmetry of emotions in partisan propaganda
2. A new model of individual opinion dynamics based on information and emotions
3. Observations and analysis  of the origins of lognormal distributions of  user post lengths in  Internet discussions
4. Dilbert-Peter model of organization effectiveness: computer simulations