Foreign disinformation operation's affective engagement: Valence versus discrete emotions as drivers of tweet popularity

Abstract

AbstractTwitter's 2018 release of its data corpus on Iran‐ and Russia‐backed accounts provided an opportunity to examine whether emotion‐laden tweets reached a wider audience than nonemotional tweets in the first large‐scale attempt to interfere in the US presidential election in 2016. We contrasted the dimensional and discrete theories of emotion by comparing tweets’ virality as a function of their valence or discrete emotional content. While both perspectives were supported by the popularity of positive and joyful tweets, the unpopularity of negative and fearful tweets uniquely supported the discrete view. The robustness of this theoretically insightful finding was checked by applying a set of keywords from the Department of Homeland Security to identify tweets that were both negative and fear‐evoking. Iranian and Russian disinformation operatives seemed unaware of negative and fearful tweets’ unpopularity and composed most posts with these sentiments. This study's findings explored the digital extensions of two emotion theories and balanced the prevailing media reporting on foreign disinformation operations’ sophistication.