Sentiment Dynamics in Social Media News Channels

TL;DR

This paper investigates how different social media news channels use sentiment to attract users and how user reactions correlate with news sentiment, analyzing Facebook data from various media outlets.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of sentiment strategies across TV, radio, and print news channels on social media and examines user reaction sentiment in relation to news content.

Findings

User opinion sentiment strongly correlates with news post sentiment.

Different news sources exhibit distinct sentiment usage patterns.

User reactions vary significantly across media types.

Abstract

Social media is currently one of the most important means of news communication. Since people are consuming a large fraction of their daily news through social media, most of the traditional news channels are using social media to catch the attention of users. Each news channel has its own strategies to attract more users. In this paper, we analyze how the news channels use sentiment to garner users' attention in social media. We compare the sentiment of social media news posts of television, radio and print media, to show the differences in the ways these channels cover the news. We also analyze users' reactions and opinion sentiment on news posts with different sentiments. We perform our experiments on a dataset extracted from Facebook Pages of five popular news channels. Our dataset contains 0.15 million news posts and 1.13 billion users reactions. The results of our experiments show that the sentiment of user opinion has a strong correlation with the sentiment of the news post and the type of information source. Our study also illustrates the differences among the social media news channels of different types of news sources.