Hashtag Burnout? A Control Experiment Investigating How Political Hashtags Shape Reactions to News Content

Abstract

Both hashtag activists and news organizations assume that trending political hashtags effectively capture the nowness of social issues that people care about [20]. In fact, news organizations with growing social media presence increasingly capitalize the use of political hashtags in article headlines and social media news posta practice aimed to generate new readership through lightweight news consumption of content by linking a particular story to a broader topic [28]. However, response to political hashtags can be complicated as demonstrated with the events surrounding #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter. In fact, the semantic simplicity of political hashtags often belies the complexities around the question of who gets to participate [71], what intersectional identities are included or excluded from the hashtag [45], as well as how the meaning of the hashtag expands and drifts [10] depending on the context through which it is expressed. Overtime, reports show increasing backlash [70, 73, 74] and polarization [21, 52, 66, 67, 70] against key issues embodied by political hashtags. In this vein, we assume that political hashtags affect how people make sense of and engage with media content. However, we do not know how the presence of political hashtags-signaling that a news story is related to a current social issue-influences the assumptions potential readers make about the social content of an article. In this work we conducted a randomized control experiment to examine how the presence of political hashtags (particularly the most prevalently used #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter) in social media news posts shape reactions across a general audience (n=1979). Our findings show that compared to the control group, people shown news posts with political hashtags perceive the news topic as less socially important and are less motivated to know more about social issues related to the post. People also find the news more partisan and controversial when hashtags are included. In fact, negative perception associated with political hashtags (partisan bias & topic controversy) mediates people's motivation to further engage with the news content). High-intensity Facebook users and politically moderate participants perceive news with political hashtags as more partisan compared to posts excluding hashtags. There are also significant differences in discourse patterns between the hashtag and control groups around how politically moderate respondents engage with the news content in their comments.

Exceptional Injustice: Facebook as a Reflection of Race- and Gender-Based Narratives Following the Death of George Floyd

“…This gave them an opportunity to change the narrative from identifying with a victim of police brutality to that of a social reformer taking control and demanding change. This general phenomenon of empowerment has been noted with Twitter data, where tweeting is used to call for social change through political participation (more than disruptive protesting) (Tillery 2019) (while hashtags are associated with partisan views (Rho and Mazmanian 2019)).…”

Improving Readers’ Awareness of Divergent Viewpoints by Displaying Agendas of Comments in Online News Discussions

“…• Word-level: Hagendas provides word-level tags, neither a phrase-level nor clause-level, as they may impose a particular intention with a specific viewpoint (e.g., #BlackLivesMatter). In such cases, readers often lose the motivation to read the contents of the post [27], which is against our intention. • Filtering: Hagendas allows readers filtering to leave associated comments by the attached agendas.…”

Persuasion or Insulting? Unpacking Discursive Strategies of Gender Debate in Everyday Feminism in China

“…It advocated for reforms in policies, practices, and power dynamics to create safer and more inclusive environments for women. These campaigns sparked important conversations, raised public awareness, and encouraged individuals and institutions to take actions [21,98,99]. These feminist practices have served as catalysts for addressing gender inequalities and advocating for the fulfillment of women's daily needs across different spheres of society.…”