  Online users discuss and converse about all sorts of topics on social
networks. Facebook, Twitter, Reddit are among many other networks where users
can have this freedom of information sharing. The abundance of information
shared over these networks makes them an attractive area for investigating all
aspects of human behavior on information dissemination. Among the many
interesting behaviors, controversiality within social cascades is of high
interest to us. It is known that controversiality is bound to happen within
online discussions. The online social network platform Reddit has the feature
to tag comments as controversial if the users have mixed opinions about that
comment. 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. On the contrary, we examine typical
cascades with comments that the readers deemed to be controversial concerning
the matter discussed. This work asks whether controversially initiated
information cascades have distinctive characteristics than those not
controversial in Reddit. 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. From the comparative
analyses conducted, controversial content travels faster and further from its
origin. 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.
