Emotions: The Unexplored Fuel of Fake News on Social Media

Does Fake News in Different Languages Tell the Same Story? An Analysis of Multi-level Thematic and Emotional Characteristics of News about COVID-19

“…Although fake news has penetrated into every social media platform, the thematic characteristics of fake news that distinguish itself from real news remain largely under explored when they are compared across different languages and/or at different levels of granularity. Studies on the emotional characteristics of fake news also suffer from similar limitations despite that emotional appeals play a significant part in producing, proliferating, and promoting fake news (Bakir & McStay, 2018 ; Horner et al, 2021 ; Martel et al, 2020 ; Paschen, 2020 ). This research is aimed to address the above-mentioned limitations.…”

“…For instance, inducing reliance on emotion would result in greater belief in fake news stories compared to no emotion or inducing reliance on reasoning (Martel et al, 2020 ). Activating emotional reactions to either spread or suppress fake news might help fake news creators to achieve their business or political objectives (Horner et al, 2021 ). Therefore, we propose the following hypotheses: H3.…”

“…According to the economics of emotion theory (Bakir & McStay, 2018 ), fake news is created to evoke emotional responses in readers that will help fake news creators achieve business or other objectives by gaining readers’ attention. In addition, the results of a user study show that “participants who reported high levels of emotions were more likely to take actions that would spread or suppress the fake news, participants who reported low levels of emotions were more likely to ignore or disengage from the spread of false news” (Horner et al, 2021 , p. 1039). This is because emotion can reflect the strategies that fake news creators or algo-journalism designers choose to influence readers by either promoting or inhibiting the associated topics (Paschen, 2020 ).…”

The effectiveness of flagging content belonging to prominent individuals: The case of Donald Trump on Twitter

“…The second area relates to the prevention of spreading of misinformation and fake news. Studies in this area have investigated how source ratings (e.g., Kim et al, 2019; Moravec et al, 2018), identity verification (e.g., Wang et al, 2021), users' attitudes and emotions (e.g., Colliander, 2019; Horner et al, 2021), content flagging (e.g., Gaozhao, 2021; Moravec et al, 2019), presentation format (e.g., Jang et al, 2018; Moravec et al, 2019), and culture (e.g., Rampersad & Althiyabi, 2020) impact misinformation spreading on social media.…”

Continuance Intention to use MOOCs: The Effects of Psychological Stimuli and Emotions

“…Emotion is an important driver of continuance intention in the use of online technologies (Yan et al, 2021 ). The extant research mainly mentions emotion as a whole (Zhang et al, 2022 ) or focuses on one aspect of emotion (Lu et al, 2019 ); however, the effects of all the discrete emotions have also been highlighted and gained much attention (Horner et al, 2021 ). Limited research has conducted deep and detailed analysis from the psychological and emotional perspectives on students’ continuance intention in MOOCs.…”