Linguistic style and affect shape how users perceive and assess political content on social media. Using linguistic methods to compare political discourse on far-left, mainstream and alt-right news articles covering the #MeToo movement, we reveal rhetorical similarities and differences in commenting behavior across the political spectrum. We employed natural language processing techniques and qualitative methods on a corpus of approximately 30,000 Facebook comments from three politically distinct news publishers. Our findings show that commenting behavior reflects how social movements are framed and understood within a particular political orientation. Surprisingly, these data reveal that the structural patterns of discourse among commenters from the two alternative news sites are similar in terms of their relationship to those from the mainstream - exhibiting polarization, generalization, and othering of perspectives in political conversation. These data have implications for understanding the possibility for civil discourse in online venues and the role of commenting behavior in polarizing media sources in undermining such discourse.
Both hashtag activists and news organizations assume that trending political hashtags effectively capture the nowness of social issues that people care about [20]. In fact, news organizations with growing social media presence increasingly capitalize the use of political hashtags in article headlines and social media news posta practice aimed to generate new readership through lightweight news consumption of content by linking a particular story to a broader topic [28]. However, response to political hashtags can be complicated as demonstrated with the events surrounding #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter. In fact, the semantic simplicity of political hashtags often belies the complexities around the question of who gets to participate [71], what intersectional identities are included or excluded from the hashtag [45], as well as how the meaning of the hashtag expands and drifts [10] depending on the context through which it is expressed. Overtime, reports show increasing backlash [70, 73, 74] and polarization [21, 52, 66, 67, 70] against key issues embodied by political hashtags. In this vein, we assume that political hashtags affect how people make sense of and engage with media content. However, we do not know how the presence of political hashtags-signaling that a news story is related to a current social issue-influences the assumptions potential readers make about the social content of an article. In this work we conducted a randomized control experiment to examine how the presence of political hashtags (particularly the most prevalently used #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter) in social media news posts shape reactions across a general audience (n=1979). Our findings show that compared to the control group, people shown news posts with political hashtags perceive the news topic as less socially important and are less motivated to know more about social issues related to the post. People also find the news more partisan and controversial when hashtags are included. In fact, negative perception associated with political hashtags (partisan bias & topic controversy) mediates people's motivation to further engage with the news content). High-intensity Facebook users and politically moderate participants perceive news with political hashtags as more partisan compared to posts excluding hashtags. There are also significant differences in discourse patterns between the hashtag and control groups around how politically moderate respondents engage with the news content in their comments.
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