Users of a social networking system perform actions on various objects maintained by the social networking system. Some of these actions may indicate that the user has a negative sentiment for an object. To make use of this negative sentiment when providing content to the user, when the social networking system determines a user performs an action on an object, the social networking system identifies topics associated with the object and associates the negative sentiment with one or more of the topics. This association between one or more topics and negative sentiment may be used to decrease the likelihood that the social networking system presents content associated with a topic that is associated with a negative sentiment of the user.