Abstract
Contemporary news often spreads via social media. This study investigated whether the processing and evaluation of online news content can be influenced by Likes and peer-user comments. An online experiment was designed, using a custom-built website that resembled Facebook, to explore how Likes, positive comments, negative comments, or a combination of positive and negative comments would affect the reader’s processing of news content. The results showed that especially negative comments affected the readers’ personal opinions about the news content, even in combination with other positive comments: They (1) induced more negative attitudes, (2) lowered intent to share it, (3) reduced agreement with conveyed ideas, (4) lowered perceived attitude of the general public, and (5) decreased the credibility of the content. Against expectations, the presence of Likes did not affect the readers, irrespective of the news content. An important consideration is that, while the negative comments were persuasive, they comprised subjective, emotive, and fallacious rhetoric. Finally, negativity bias, the perception of expert authority, and cognitive heuristics are discussed as potential explanations for the persuasive effect of negative comments.
Highlights
The rise of social media has introduced virtually unlimited communication and unprecedented access to information
The presence of negative comments (1) negatively affected the readers’ attitude towards the news article, (2) reduced the likelihood the reader would share or recommend it, (3) reduced agreement with ideas conveyed in the article, (4) engendered the perceived public attitude more negatively, and (5) even reduced the credibility of the article
Analyses of interaction effects between article-content type and comment sentiment revealed positive comments had different effects based on the predisposition towards the article
Summary
The rise of social media has introduced virtually unlimited communication and unprecedented access to information. These variables were partially adapted from previous studies (Appelman and Sundar, 2016; Winter et al, 2015; Xu, 2013): (a) attitude—the reader’s personal disposition towards the content, (b) share intent —the reader’s intension to share or recommend the content, (c) ideological congruence—the extent to which the reader agrees with content-conveyed ideas, (d) perceived public attitude—the reader’s perception of the general public’s attitude towards the content, and (e) credibility—the reader’s perception of the credibility of the content In this study, these categories were considered to adequately reflect content processing and evaluation
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