Abstract

What political social media messages resonate and get shared? We analyzed the first three months of tweets from Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump since winning their respective nominations and found that messages containing #hashtags, @usermentions, or http://www.websitelinks.com decreased likes and retweets. While these features are intended to increase audience exposure, their presence concurrently increases disfluency – the subjective experience of difficulty associated with cognition. These features make the message less visually clear (perceptual disfluency) and require the translation of symbols and text strings into meaning (orthographic disfluency). Features that improved processing fluency (i.e. embedded images) increased interactions. These findings underscore the importance of fluency in brief word-of-mouth transmissions and suggest strategies for social media users seeking to influence the voting public.

摘要

哪些政治社交媒体消息引起共鸣并得到分享？我们分析了希拉里·克林顿和唐纳德·特朗普赢得各自提名以来的头三个月的推文，发现包含＃hashtags，@ usermentions或http://www.websitelinks.com的消息减少了喜欢和转发。尽管这些功能旨在增加受众的曝光度，但它们的出现同时会增加流离失所感–与认知相关的主观体验。这些功能使消息在视觉上不太清晰（感知上有歧义），并且要求将符号和文本字符串转换为含义（正交上有歧义）。改善处理流畅性的功能（即嵌入式图像）增加了交互。