Real Talk, Virtual Faces: Symbolic-Semantic Discourse Geometry of Virtual and Human Influencer Audiences

TL;DR

This study introduces a symbolic-semantic framework to analyze and compare audience discourse patterns around virtual and human influencers on social media, revealing distinct organizational and sentiment differences.

Contribution

It develops a novel framework combining Formal Concept Analysis and semantic embedding to analyze discourse structure and sentiment in large-scale social media comments.

Findings

HI discourse is stability-centered with positive sentiment linked to low neuroticism.

VI discourse exhibits multiple regimes and more dispersed semantic concepts.

VI comments show more negative sentiment in sensitive topics like mental health and body image.

Abstract

Virtual influencers~(VIs) -- digitally constructed social-media personas -- are becoming increasingly visible in online culture, marketing, and identity formation. Yet it remains unclear whether audiences respond to them through the same discourse patterns used for human influencers~(HIs), or whether virtuality produces distinctive modes of reaction. Existing studies often rely on surveys, engagement statistics, or marginal sentiment distributions, which reveal what audiences say but not how affective, topical, and psycholinguistic signals are jointly organised. We introduce a symbolic-semantic framework for analysing audience discourse around virtual and human influencers. The symbolic layer uses Formal Concept Analysis and association rule mining to extract closed co-occurrence structures from sentiment labels, topic tags, and Big Five psycholinguistic cues. The semantic layer renders these formal concepts as natural-language descriptions, embeds them with MiniLM, and compares their geometry across VI and HI audiences. Applied to 69,498 YouTube comments from three matched VI-HI influencer pairs, our analysis shows that HI discourse is organised around a compact, stability-centred pattern in which low neuroticism anchors positive sentiment, whereas VI discourse supports multiple discourse regimes. VI concepts are also more semantically dispersed than HI concepts, while both groups show strong symbolic-semantic alignment between closed-set structure and embedding geometry. Finally, VI discourse contains a distinct artificial-identity region and a higher concentration of negative sentiment in sensitive topics such as mental health, body image, and artificial identity. These findings suggest that virtuality reshapes not only the sentiment of audience reactions, but also the symbolic and semantic organisation of online social discourse.