Appropriately Angry? Comparative Emotion Norms in Online Political Discussion

• In Event: Social Media and Canadian Politics

Abstract

Previous political communication work suggests that anger expression drives social media engagement. Specifically, angry posts are more likely to be rewarded with 'likes' or 'shares'. This common finding sits oddly with widespread social norms, which discourage the expression of anger in most everyday conversations. This study examines whether and under what circumstances these findings generalize to the Reddit social media platform. In addition to being a more discussion-based platform, Reddit is home to communities (known as subreddits) with varying norms. Thus, users are likely to evaluate posts to a subreddit in context-specific ways. I theorize that anger is considered more appropriate in political (vs. non-political) discussions. Thus, I hypothesize that posts expressing anger are more likely to be rewarded in subreddits focused on politics. Previous work in this area has primarily focused on the United States. Canada has its own unique political culture and social norms, including a reputation for politeness and a more reserved communication style. As such, I also explore differences in anger expression norms between Canadian and American subreddits. Using corpus-informed, dictionary-based quantitative text analysis, I capture the presence and intensity of anger expression in more than 2,000 posts. I then measure engagement (number of comments) and evaluation (karma score) to determine the extent to which anger expression is rewarded, and whether this varies by subreddit and/or post topic. Implications for emotion in politics and political engagement research are discussed.

Author

• Jessica Burch, Simon Fraser University