The cueing power of comments on social media: how disagreement in Facebook comments affects user engagement with news

ABSTRACT

Previous research demonstrates that conflict framing in news articles can influence individuals’ attention, selection, and distribution of news. However, no study has examined whether the valence of social media comment fields can trigger similar effects for news engagement on Facebook. In this mixed-methods study, we combine eye tracking with surveys, and conduct an experiment in which participants (n = 96) were exposed to 20 Facebook news posts from the Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet. Under each post, we presented participants with a pair of real (but anonymized) Facebook comments that were either in agreement or disagreement with one another. We then examined how this manipulation influenced participants’ visual attention to comment fields, their self-reported likelihood to click on the post to read the full story, and their self-reported likelihood to share the news post to their Facebook network. Our results show that comments in disagreement increased users’ visual attention to comments, decreased their likelihood to share the post, and had no effect on their likelihood to read the news article associated with the post. Thus, the presence of disagreement in comments does cue news engagement on Facebook, but the effect is not uniform across different news engagement behaviors. Moreover, engagement with hard versus soft news topics also varied. Disagreement in comments to Facebook posts about soft news topics (Entertainment, Society, and Sports) increased users’ attention to the comments field. In contrast, comment disagreement for hard news topics (Economy and Politics) reduced users’ attention to the comment field, as well as their self-reported likelihood to read the post.

KEYWORDS:

• Social media
• eye tracking
• Journalism
• news sharing
• social news gap
• visual attention

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s). The authors gratefully acknowledge Lund University Humanities Lab, where the data were recorded.

Notes

1 See the exact set-up for our Areas of Interest (AOIs) on page 15.

2 Our stimuli are published on FigShare at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.11877363.v1.

3 Due to an error on our part, one post in the Sports category lacked a disagreement condition. All trials for this post (n = 49) are treated as agreement in the analysis.

4 The survey questions can be found on FigShare at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.11877300.v1. The full dataset (eye tracking measures and survey results) is available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.11935623.v1.

5 For a full account of all statistical tests we ran, and their corresponding results please consult the R markdown file available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.11935677.v1.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anamaria Dutceac Segesten

Anamaria Dutceac Segesten is Associate Professor in Strategic Communication and Senior Lecturer in European Studies, Lund University.

Michael Bossetta

Michael Bossetta is Deputy Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication, Lund University.

Nils Holmberg

Nils Holmberg is Senior Lecturer in Strategic Communication, Lund University.

Diederick Niehorster

Diederick Niehorster is Researcher at the Humanities Lab, Lund University.