Highlights
- Compared to true news, political disinformation received less analytic responses.
- Responses to political disinformation were filled with anger and incivility.
- There was greater anxiety in user responses to true news than to disinformation.
- Responses to conservative and liberal disinformation were similarly less analytic.
- Incivility and anger were most prevalent in responses to liberal disinformation.
The epidemic of political disinformation in social media has in part triggered the transition to the post-truth era in which emotional and ideological appeals are more influential in shaping public opinion than objective facts.
In this study we examined the cognitive and affective responses that political disinformation prompted in Facebook, as the most popular social media platform.
Through text analysis of user comments corpora on nearly 2,100 political posts from popular sources in Facebook, we found that compared to true news, political disinformation received significantly less analytic responses from Facebook followers.
While the results indicated greater anxiety in responses to true news, responses to political disinformation were filled with greater anger and incivility. We also found similar (low) levels of cognitive thinki, pg in responses to extreme conservative and extreme liberal disinformation.
Contrary to prior research findings, our results indicated that responses to extreme liberal disinformation in Facebook were filled with greater anger and incivility.
This suggests that the incivility and outrage in online political discourses should not be attributed to a specific political party without considering the concurrent political events.
Labels:
political_disinformation, polarisation, echo_chamber, text_analysis, social_media, Facebook,
No comments:
Post a Comment