Abstract
How do audiences make sense of and interact with political junk news on Facebook? How does the platform’s “emotional architecture” intervene in these sense-making, interactive processes? What kinds of mediated publics emerge on and through Facebook as a result? We study these questions through topic modeling 40,500 junk news articles, quantitatively analyzing their engagement metrics, and a qualitative comment analysis. This exploratory research design allows us to move between levels of public discourse, zooming in from cross-outlet talking points to microsociological processes of meaning-making, interaction, and emotional entrainment taking place within the comment boxes themselves. We propose the concepts of delighting and detesting engagement to illustrate how the interplay between audiences, platform architecture, and political junk news generates a bivalent emotional dynamic that routinely divides posts into highly “loved” and highly “angering.” We argue that high-performing (or in everyday parlance, viral) junk news bring otherwise disparate audience members together and orient their dramatic focus toward objects of collective joy, anger, or concern. In this context, the nature of political junk news is performative as they become resources for emotional signaling and the construction of group identity and shared feeling on social media. The emotions that animate junk news audiences typically refer back to a transpiring social relationship between two political sides. This affectively loaded “us” versus “them” dynamic is both enforced by Facebook’s emotional architecture and made use of by junk news publishers.
Highlights
Facebook has been a key site for the propagation of junk news, content that Liotsiou et al (2019) define as publications that present themselves as news sites, but do not adhere to journalistic norms and ethics, and instead select, frame, and distort evidence to suit their political agenda
We discovered that the interplay between junk news, audiences, and Facebook’s emotional architecture generates a bivalent emotional logic: “love” and “angry” reactions rarely cooccurred, and correlated most strongly with different other reactions
We argue that the nature of political junk news is performative as they become resources for emotional signaling and the construction of group identity and shared feeling on social media
Summary
Facebook has been a key site for the propagation of junk news, content that Liotsiou et al (2019) define as publications that present themselves as news sites, but do not adhere to journalistic norms and ethics, and instead select, frame, and distort evidence to suit their political agenda. We target the operation of emotion among audiences of right-wing junk news with the concepts of delighting and detesting engagement, understood as products of users’ interactions with and around news stories on a social media platform that encourages emotional signaling of certain types and evolves in response to it.
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