Delighting and Detesting Engagement: Emotional Politics of Junk News

Abstract

How do audiences make sense of and interact with political junk news on Facebook? How does the platform’s “emotional architecture” intervene in these sense-making, interactive processes? What kinds of mediated publics emerge on and through Facebook as a result? We study these questions through topic modeling 40,500 junk news articles, quantitatively analyzing their engagement metrics, and a qualitative comment analysis. This exploratory research design allows us to move between levels of public discourse, zooming in from cross-outlet talking points to microsociological processes of meaning-making, interaction, and emotional entrainment taking place within the comment boxes themselves. We propose the concepts of delighting and detesting engagement to illustrate how the interplay between audiences, platform architecture, and political junk news generates a bivalent emotional dynamic that routinely divides posts into highly “loved” and highly “angering.” We argue that high-performing (or in everyday parlance, viral) junk news bring otherwise disparate audience members together and orient their dramatic focus toward objects of collective joy, anger, or concern. In this context, the nature of political junk news is performative as they become resources for emotional signaling and the construction of group identity and shared feeling on social media. The emotions that animate junk news audiences typically refer back to a transpiring social relationship between two political sides. This affectively loaded “us” versus “them” dynamic is both enforced by Facebook’s emotional architecture and made use of by junk news publishers.

A Sadness Bias in Political News Sharing? The Role of Discrete Emotions in the Engagement and Dissemination of Political News on Facebook

“…With the ability to publicly express displeasure at the click of a button, it is becoming easier for affective publics to voice their discontent (Papacharissi & De Fatima Oliveira, 2012). This speaks of the rising body of literature that documents the prevalence of anger as an emotional expression on Facebook in relation to political news (Savolainen et al, 2020;Sturm Wilkerson et al, 2021) and politician posts throughout the world (Eberl et al, 2020;Heiss et al, 2019;Jost et al, 2020;Muraoka et al, 2021).…”

“…Studies have made use of these Reactions to understand how publics engage with a wide variety of material on Facebook, including posts from political actors (Eberl et al, 2020;Jost et al, 2020), and news articles (Larsson, 2018;Savolainen et al, 2020;Sturm Wilkerson et al, 2021). While several have broadly categorized Reactions into positive (Love, Wow, and Haha) and negative (Angry and Sad) sentiment (Eberl et al, 2020;Savolainen et al, 2020), we argue that these Reactions can be better understood as discrete choices rather than on a simple negative-positive scale.…”

“…The valence of Facebook Reactions is usually in line with the content they are Reacting to (Giuntini et al, 2019). The popular Love and Angry Reactions have been shown to be commonly used with positive and negative political party posts and news (Eberl et al, 2020;Muraoka et al, 2021;Savolainen et al, 2020). Much less has been said about the Sad and Wow Reactions.…”

“…Emotions can also impact news sharing. Emotions in news articles impact their "shareworthiness" (Savolainen et al, 2020;Trilling et al, 2017), and, in general, emotional news is more popular on Facebook (Gupta & Yang, 2019). While work on general news sharing has demonstrated that the presence of either positive or negative content leads to higher sharing (Bakshy et al, 2011;Berger, 2012;Kümpel et al, 2015), studies focusing exclusively on political news have shown that negative content receives more attention on websites, with some initial evidence that this attention translates into news sharing on SNS (Harcup & O'Neill, 2017;Ørmen, 2019;Trussler & Soroka, 2014).…”

Insta(nt)famous? Visual self-presentation and the use of masculine and feminine issues by female politicians on Instagram

“…Audience engagement is usually understood as the sum of metrics such as comments, likes, replies, etc., depending on the platform. Yet, it is important to understand that these different components of engagement have different affordances and can serve different functions (e.g., Ferrer-Conill et al, 2021;Savolainen et al, 2020). Also empirically, it has been shown that the number of, for instance, shares, likes, and comments of political content is not influenced in the same way by the same predictors (e.g., Judina & Platonov, 2019;Larsson, 2018;Trilling et al, 2017).…”