An analysis of a vast number of Facebook posts from the United States, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Belgium, France, and Germany reveals that posts from alternative and hyper-partisan media, as well as those from populist politicians and parties, tend to elicit elevated levels of angry reactions. An interesting exception to this pattern is former U.S. President Donald Trump, who, despite being classified as a populist, consistently elicited more positive emotions, including “love,” even when delivering messages that could be seen as antagonistic. These findings were recently published in the journal Political Communication.
In recent decades, social media platforms have become central to political discussions and activities. They offer users the ability to express their attitudes and voice their opinions on various topics, making them a powerful tool for both citizens and political actors. Given this, news media and political figures are constantly competing for the attention of social media users. Posts that evoke strong emotions are particularly effective at capturing this attention, which is why these actors frequently use emotionally charged content.
Inciting negative emotions, such as anger or anxiety, has proven especially effective in grabbing the attention of social media users. Posts that stir emotions are more likely to provoke strong reactions, particularly when they address controversial issues. Populist politicians—those who claim to represent the common people against a perceived elite or establishment—have become particularly adept at using emotional appeals to increase their reach and attract new followers.
Similarly, alternative and hyper-partisan news outlets often publish emotionally charged content to boost user engagement and increase the visibility of their posts. Hyper-partisan media are news outlets that strongly favor a particular political party or ideology, often presenting information in a biased or exaggerated manner to promote their agenda.
Study author Edda Humprecht and her colleagues conducted a media analysis to explore how various countries differ in terms of the emotional reactions of users on Facebook and what kind of content provokes these reactions. The study specifically examined how different types of political actors—populist versus traditional politicians—and news media outlets—hyper-partisan versus traditional media—differ in their ability to elicit emotional user reactions, particularly anger.
The researchers analyzed posts and user engagement levels from 148 Facebook pages belonging to various political actors and media outlets. The study period spanned from April 14, 2020, to June 30, 2020, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic when many countries were under lockdown in an attempt to mitigate the spread of the virus. These lockdowns, which were widely debated and sometimes contested by political actors, became a major topic of political discourse during this time. The six countries studied—Belgium, France, Germany, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States—differed significantly in their approaches to managing the pandemic, which provided a rich context for examining the emotional responses to political content on social media.
Facebook was particularly suitable for studying emotional reactions because it allows users to express their feelings about a post not just by liking it but also by using one of six other emojis, each representing a different emotion (e.g., love, anger, sadness).
To gather data, the researchers accessed public Facebook posts using the CrowdTangle API and the Facebook Graph API through an application called Facepager. CrowdTangle, a Meta-owned analytics platform, tracks posts published by verified public profiles and groups, enabling the researchers to create a dataset consisting of over 175,000 Facebook posts.
Of these, 46,000 were from the United States, 43,000 from the United Kingdom, 36,000 from France, and between 10,000 and 25,000 from each of the other three countries. The analysis focused on metadata related to emotional reactions (expressed through likes or emojis), as well as the number of likes, shares, and comments for each post. The researchers then compared emotional reactions across countries and different groups of actors.
Results showed pronounced differences in emotional reactions across the six countries. Emotional reactions were comparatively rarer in posts from Switzerland and France, while they were more than twice as frequent in posts from Belgium and the United States. As expected, likes were the most common type of reaction, likely because the “like” button is the default and most easily accessible on Facebook. However, the second most frequently used reaction was “anger.”
Posts from alternative and hyper-partisan media outlets, as well as those from populist politicians and parties, consistently elicited higher levels of angry reactions. The researchers noted that these posts often employed anti-elitist and exclusionary language, which means they opposed and criticized perceived elites while marginalizing or dismissing certain groups or individuals as unworthy or as being outside the speaker’s group. Such rhetoric is designed to provoke strong emotional responses, particularly anger, among followers who resonate with these sentiments.
Donald Trump, who was the president of the United States during the study period, emerged as a notable exception to the general trend. Although the researchers describe him as “a populist governing figure,” his posts tended to elicit more positive emotions, including love, even when he delivered messages that could be considered antagonistic. This suggests that Trump’s core supporters reacted positively to his rhetoric, likely due to their strong loyalty to him and their alignment with his political messages, even when those messages targeted opponents or presented controversial views.
“Our findings provide a more nuanced view of the conditions that foster political misinformation and emotional contagion on social media. The similarities across countries show how some actors with extreme positions effectively utilize the mechanisms Facebook provides,” the study authors concluded.
The research sheds light on the way individuals react to Facebook posts across six countries, highlighting the significant role that populist rhetoric and hyper-partisan media play in shaping emotional responses online. However, it is important to note that the study was conducted during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, a period marked by unprecedented lockdowns and widespread social and political tension. As such, the emotional reactions observed in this study might differ from those in more typical times.
The paper, “Emotionalized Social Media Environments: How Alternative News Media and Populist Actors Drive Angry Reactions,” was authored by Edda Humprecht, Michael Amsler, Frank Esser, and Peter Van Aelst.
