Angry Friends, Happy Crowd: How the Emotionally Charged Content Influences Online Behavior

Abstract

Social media are becoming new venues for more and more people to get information, express opinions, and connect with others. Various online communication behaviors carry and, meanwhile, are influenced by certain emotions. This study adopted a mixed method of survey and in-depth interviews to examine how the emotionally loaded content influenced people's online engagement. The targeted population focused on those active users on Chinese social media. The results revealed a unique phenomenon on social media in post-Covid China that both joy and anger attracted greater attention and more interaction. Also, the emotion of shock turned out to be unexpectedly influential on people's sharing behavior. It ranked ahead of anger and was second only to joy in getting people's attention. Furthermore, this study found that the content virality depended on the intended audience groupthat people tended to forward the angry messages to friends in private and retweet the joyful content publicly. These findings added nuances to previous literature concerning the role of emotions on social media. It reflected a relatively new reality of the post-Covid online phenomena in China.