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Autori principali: Talaga, Szymon, Batorski, Dominik, Wojcieszak, Magdalena
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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Accesso online:https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.19300
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author Talaga, Szymon
Batorski, Dominik
Wojcieszak, Magdalena
author_facet Talaga, Szymon
Batorski, Dominik
Wojcieszak, Magdalena
contents Although news negativity is often studied, missing is comparative evidence on the prevalence of and engagement with negative political and non-political news posts on social media. We use 6,081,134 Facebook posts published between January 1, 2020, and April 1, 2024, by 97 media organizations in six countries (U.S., UK, Ireland, Poland, France, Spain) and develop two multilingual classifiers for labeling posts as (non-)political and (non-)negative. We show that: (1) negative news posts constitute a relatively small fraction (12.6%); (2) political news posts are neither more nor less negative than non-political news posts; (3) U.S. political news posts are less negative relative to the other countries on average (40% lower odds); (4) Negative news posts get 15% fewer likes and 13% fewer comments than non-negative news posts. Lastly, (5) we provide estimates of the proportion of the total volume of user engagement with negative news posts and show that only between 10.2% to 13.1% of engagement is linked to negative posts by the analyzed news organizations.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_19300
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Negative news posts are less prevalent and generate lower user engagement than non-negative news posts across six countries
Talaga, Szymon
Batorski, Dominik
Wojcieszak, Magdalena
Social and Information Networks
Machine Learning
Although news negativity is often studied, missing is comparative evidence on the prevalence of and engagement with negative political and non-political news posts on social media. We use 6,081,134 Facebook posts published between January 1, 2020, and April 1, 2024, by 97 media organizations in six countries (U.S., UK, Ireland, Poland, France, Spain) and develop two multilingual classifiers for labeling posts as (non-)political and (non-)negative. We show that: (1) negative news posts constitute a relatively small fraction (12.6%); (2) political news posts are neither more nor less negative than non-political news posts; (3) U.S. political news posts are less negative relative to the other countries on average (40% lower odds); (4) Negative news posts get 15% fewer likes and 13% fewer comments than non-negative news posts. Lastly, (5) we provide estimates of the proportion of the total volume of user engagement with negative news posts and show that only between 10.2% to 13.1% of engagement is linked to negative posts by the analyzed news organizations.
title Negative news posts are less prevalent and generate lower user engagement than non-negative news posts across six countries
topic Social and Information Networks
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.19300