Negative news posts are less prevalent and generate lower user engagement than non-negative news posts across six countries

TL;DR

This study analyzes a large dataset of Facebook news posts across six countries, revealing that negative news is less common and receives lower user engagement than non-negative news, with notable cross-country differences.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive, multilingual analysis of negative news prevalence and engagement across multiple countries, filling a gap in comparative social media research.

Findings

Negative news posts are only 12.6% of all posts.

Negative political news is not more prevalent than non-political news.

Negative news posts receive 15% fewer likes and 13% fewer comments.

Abstract

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.