Negative Messages Spread Rapidly and Widely on Social Media

Abstract

We investigate the relation between the sentiment of a message on social media and its virality, defined as the volume and the speed of message diffusion. We analyze 4.1 million messages (tweets) obtained from Twitter. Although factors affecting message diffusion on social media have been studied previously, we focus on message sentiment, and reveal how the polarity of message sentiment affects its virality. The virality of a message is measured by the number of message repostings (retweets) and the time elapsed from the original posting of a message to its N th reposting (N-retweet time). Through extensive analyses, we find that negative messages are likely to be reposted more rapidly and frequently than positive and neutral messages. Specifically, the reposting volume of negative messages is 1.2-1.6-fold that of positive and neutral messages, and negative messages spread at 1.25 times the speed of positive and neutral messages when the diffusion volume is large.

Analyzing Twitter Conversation on Genome-Edited Foods and Their Labeling in Japan

“…Boyd et al (2010) found that people prefer retweets that contain breaking and timely news. Naveed et al (2011) found that tweets that address public events or include emoticons that reveal more negative emotions than positive ones are likely to be retweeted; Negative tweets are generally more often retweeted than positive ones regardless of their subject matter (Stieglitz and Dang-Xuan, 2012;Tsugawa and Ohsaki, 2015). These findings are consistent with our results on co-occurrence networks that words from tweets with a negative tone increased when adding retweets to the analysis.…”

The decision‐making process in viral marketing—A review and suggestions for further research

“…Moreover, these negative contents spread faster. Furthermore, the results of Tsugawa and Ohsaki () could not be confirmed in the work of Stieglitz and Dang‐Xuan (), who also examined content on Twitter. It was merely noted that emotions in written content promote virality and speed of distribution, but no significant difference was found between positive and negative emotions.…”

“…In contrast, surprising content is more likely to work on Google+ (Heimbach & Hinz, ). According to Tsugawa and Ohsaki (), negative content on the social network Twitter is more viral than positive content. Moreover, these negative contents spread faster.…”

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“…[21] indicated that emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness. Reference [22]- [24] researched the emotion diffusion, and further confirmed emotional contagion in social networks.…”