Shared Emotion: The Social Amplification of Partisan News on Twitter

Abstract

As people increasingly rely on social media for news, it is important to understand what types of news media they are likely to come across in their social media environment. Exposure to news content in social media is the result of complex, interdependent systems driven by individuals, platforms, and institutions—among others—but an important element of exposure is what kind of news content engaged individuals tend to share with their peers. This study examines how partisan news media may be influential in social media by proposing that their content is shared more frequently and that they share more emotional content than non-partisan news media. This study examines more than 300,000 tweets and retweets from 22 news organizations to understand what type of political news is shared more widely in social media and how emotion in news content can influence political news sharing. The results suggest that partisan news media are shared more frequently in Twitter, and that partisan news content is more likely to express emotion compared with non-partisan news. Overall, partisan and emotional news media content is disproportionately amplified in social media, which may have important consequences for others who rely on social media for political news information.