Emotional Framing in the Spreading of False and True Claims

Abstract

The explosive growth of online misinformation, such as false claims, has affected the social behavior of online users. In order to be persuasive and mislead the audience, false claims are made to trigger emotions in their audience. This paper contributes to understanding how misinformation in social media is shaped by investigating the emotional framing that authors of the claims try to create for their audience. We investigate how, firstly, the existence of emotional framing in the claims depends on the topic and credibility of the claims. Secondly, we explore how emotionally framed content triggers emotional response posts by social media users, and how emotions expressed in claims and corresponding users’ response posts affect their sharing behavior on social media. Analysis of four data sets covering different topics (politics, health, Syrian war, and COVID-19) reveals that authors shape their claims depending on the topic area to pass targeted emotions to their audience. By analysing responses to claims, we show that the credibility of the claim influences the distribution of emotions that the claim incites in its audience. Moreover, our analysis shows that emotions expressed in the claims are repeated in the users’ responses. Finally, the analysis of users’ sharing behavior shows that negative emotional framing such as anger, fear, and sadness of false claims leads to more interaction among users than positive emotions. This analysis also reveals that in the claims that trigger happy responses, true claims result in more sharing compared to false claims.