IMPACT AND DIFFUSION OF SENTIMENT IN PUBLIC COMMUNICATION ON FACEBOOK

In recent years, political parties and politicians have begun to use public Facebook pages not only for the purpose of self-presentation but also to aim at entering into direct dialogues with citizens and enabling political discussions. Not only the owner of the page but also any people who are politically interested can create politically relevant postings on the Wall of the page. These Wall posts often exhibit sentiment associated with certain political topics, political parties or politicians. In this paper, we seek to examine whether sentiment occurring in Wall posts on public political Facebook pages has an effect on feedback in terms of the quantity of triggered comments. Based on a data set of 5,626 Wall posts from Facebook pages of German political parties and politicians, we find different significant relationships between the quantity of words indicating positive and negative emotions in a Wall post and the number of its corresponding comments. Furthermore, our results show that positive as well as negative emotions might diffuse in the subsequent comments

An Investigation of Predictors of Information Diffusion in Social Media: Evidence from Sentiment Mining of Twitter Messages

Social media have facilitated information sharing in social networks. Previous research shows that sentiment of text influences its diffusion in social media. Each emotion can be located on a three-dimensional space formed by dimensions of valence (positive–negative), arousal (passive / calm–active / excited), and tension (tense–relaxed). While previous research has investigated the effect of emotional valence on information diffusion in social media, the effect of emotional arousal remains unexplored. This study examines how emotional arousal influences information diffusion in social media using a sentiment mining approach. We propose a research model and test it using data collected from Twitter

Crafting Audience Engagement in Social Media Conversations: Evidence from the U.S. 2020 Presidential Elections

Observing inconsistent results in prior studies, this paper applies the elaboration likelihood model to investigate the impact of affective and cognitive cues embedded in social media messages on audience engagement during a political event. Leveraging a rich dataset in the context of the 2020 U.S. presidential elections containing more than 3 million tweets, we found the prominence of both cue types. For the overall sample, positivity and sentiment are negatively related to engagement. In contrast, the post-hoc sub-sample analysis of tweets from famous users shows that emotionally charged content is more engaging. The role of sentiment decreases when the number of followers grows and ultimately becomes insignificant for Twitter participants with a vast number of followers. Prosocial orientation (“we-talk”) is consistently associated with more likes, comments, and retweets in the overall sample and sub-samples

The Role of Emotional Expression in Accessing Social Networks: The Case of Newcomers\u27 Blogs

Research has established the critical role of social networks in facilitating adjustment to foreign environments. Increasingly, social interactions are happening through computer mediated technology. This paper explores the role of emotional expression in newcomers’ blogs in developing and interacting with social networks in a new country. This research uses a dictionary-based text analytics approach to detect emotional expression in newcomers’ blog posts and their associated discussions. Blog posts with more emotional expression had more associated responses; discussions tended to be more positive than posts; and the relative amount of negative emotion in the discussions increases as posts become more negative. Results suggest that expression of emotion in blogs can facilitate access to social networks and increase engagement in online communities by increasing the amount of responses and triggering congruent emotional response from blog readers, which is a precursor to affiliation and understanding. The findings in this paper highlight the role of emotional expression in blog posts and discussions, and its connection to developing social networks and engaging in online communities which has the potential to facilitate access to social support

Social Media Sentiment Contagion

We propose an empirical setting to discover sentiment contagion in social media. We find that, after controlling for concurrent events, sentiment contagion exists in social media. We conduct additional analyses to explore how the source and valence of exposure contents and individual heterogeneity affect the degree of sentiment contagion. We find robust evidence of sentiment contagion not only in contents under the same thread but also under different threads of the same forum. Additional analysis provides evidence of negativity bias. In terms of individual heterogeneity, we find that more experienced social media users are less sensitive to sentiments in social media. Last, we find that social media users are more likely to become inactive in the long run after being exposed to more negative contents. Managerial and practical implications are discussed

Wie algorithmische Prozesse Öffentlichkeit strukturieren

Algorithmische Prozesse strukturieren heute längst Öffentlichkeit, sei es in Form der Ergebnislisten von Suchmaschinen oder der Sortierung von Inhalten in den Newsfeeds sozialer Netzwerke. Diese neuen Gatekeeper, die Informationen zugänglich machen aber auch nach Relevanz gewichten, wenden andere Kriterien an, als das etwa Journalisten bei der Auswahl und Gewichtung von Inhalten tun. Die Sortierentscheidungen dieser Systeme basieren auf einer Vielzahl von Messwerten, von Verweildauer über Scrollgeschwindigkeit bis hin zu sozialen Variablen. Gleichzeitig treten die Prinzipien der Sortiermechanismen in Wechselwirkung mit anderen Faktoren, die dafür sorgen, dass nun Inhalte ein breites Publikum erreichen können, was noch vor zehn bis zwanzig Jahren kaum möglich gewesen wäre. Die Debatte über »Fake News« ist ein Aspekt dieser Entwicklung, die über Social Bots und andere Werkzeuge digitaler Propaganda ein anderer, und auch das Phänomen von Echokammern oder Filterblasen fällt in diesen Bereich. Der Beitrag umreißt wichtige Einflussfaktoren dieser neuen digitalen Öffentlichkeiten, lotet ihre Bedeutung für den aktuellen politischen Diskurs im Inland aus und zeigt kurz mögliche Ansätze für Folgenabschätzung und Regulierung auf

Affective turn of political communication on social media

1 Tato disertační práce se věnuje proměnám politické komunikace pohledem studií afektu, ozřejmuje vzájemné vztahy mezi energií politického lídra, následný intersubjektivní proces tvorby emoční energie mezi jeho příznivci a z toho plynoucí rituální a parasociální vztahy a následně vše zasazuje do aktuálního konceptu politického fandomu. Jednotlivé fenomény práce zkoumá pomocí virtuální etnografie, přičemž za určující znaky afektivních projevů považuje paralingvistické a fatické aspekty komunikace. V analytické části práce volí jako reprezentanta tohoto širšího fenoménu hnutí Přísaha, jejího lídra Roberta Šlachtu a komunitu příznivců tohoto hnutí na Facebooku. Disertační práce zdůrazňuje především jedinečnost výsledné synergie a proces tvorby politického fandomu, přičemž i přes strategicky řízenou a neautentickou komunikaci jsou výsledné emoce příznivců autentické a ti prožívají intenzivní emoce naděje, odvahy, lásky či péče. Energie samotného lídra je primárním stimulantem, který příznivce k hnutí přitahuje a podporuje jejich aktivitu. Prožívaná emoční energie, která je v tomto případě spojující substancí a příčinou vzniku online interakčních rituálů a parasociálních vztahů, má pro příznivce silný motivační účinek, a proto tyto mikrosituace chtějí prožívat znovu nejen v jiných chvílích, ale i v jiných...1 This dissertation examines the transformations of political communication through the lens of the affective turn explaining the interrelationships between the energy of the political leader, the subsequent intersubjective process of emotional energy production among his supporters, ritual and parasocial relations, and the establishing of political fandom. The thesis explores individual phenomena through virtual ethnography, taking the paralinguistic and phatic aspects of communication as the defining features of affective expressions. The analytical part of the thesis explores the Přísaha movement, its leader Robert Šlachta and the movement's Facebook community as representative of this broader phenomenon. In particular, the dissertation highlights the uniqueness of the resulting synergy creating political fandom and the fact that despite strategically managed and inauthentic communication, the resulting emotions of the supporters are authentic, and they experience intense feelings of hope, courage, love or care. The energy of the leader himself is the primary stimulus that draws followers into the movement, and encourages their activity. The emotional energy experienced, which in this case is the unifying substance and the cause of the emergence of interaction rituals in the structure of online social...Katedra mediálních studiíDepartment of Media StudiesFakulta sociálních vědFaculty of Social Science