How do audiences make sense of and interact with political junk news on Facebook? How does the platform’s “emotional architecture” intervene in these sense-making, interactive processes? What kinds of mediated publics emerge on and through Facebook as a result? We study these questions through topic modeling 40,500 junk news articles, quantitatively analyzing their engagement metrics, and a qualitative comment analysis. This exploratory research design allows us to move between levels of public discourse, zooming in from cross-outlet talking points to microsociological processes of meaning-making, interaction, and emotional entrainment taking place within the comment boxes themselves. We propose the concepts of delighting and detesting engagement to illustrate how the interplay between audiences, platform architecture, and political junk news generates a bivalent emotional dynamic that routinely divides posts into highly “loved” and highly “angering.” We argue that high-performing (or in everyday parlance, viral) junk news bring otherwise disparate audience members together and orient their dramatic focus toward objects of collective joy, anger, or concern. In this context, the nature of political junk news is performative as they become resources for emotional signaling and the construction of group identity and shared feeling on social media. The emotions that animate junk news audiences typically refer back to a transpiring social relationship between two political sides. This affectively loaded “us” versus “them” dynamic is both enforced by Facebook’s emotional architecture and made use of by junk news publishers.

观众如何理解Facebook上的政治垃圾新闻并与之互动？平台的“情感架构”如何干预这些有意义的互动过程？结果，在Facebook上和通过Facebook出现了哪些类型的媒体公众？我们通过对40,500个垃圾新闻文章进行主题建模，定量分析其参与度指标和定性评论分析来研究这些问题。这种探索性的研究设计使我们能够在公共话语之间切换，从交叉插座的谈话点放大到在注释框本身内发生的意义，互动和情感诱因的微观社会学过程。我们提出了令人愉悦和憎恶互动的概念，以说明受众群体，平台架构，政治垃圾新闻产生了一种双向的情感动因，通常会将帖子分为高度“喜欢”和高度“愤怒”。我们认为，高效的（或用日常说法来说，病毒式的）垃圾新闻将原本互不相同的听众聚集在一起，并将他们的戏剧性焦点对准了集体的欢乐，愤怒或关注的对象。在这种情况下，政治垃圾新闻的性质具有表现力，因为它们成为情感信号以及在社交媒体上构建群体身份和共享感觉的资源。那些使垃圾新闻观众动起来的情绪通常指的是两个政治方面之间正在形成的社交关系。这种情感加载的“我们”与“他们”的动态既是由Facebook的情感架构所实施，又是由垃圾新闻发布者利用的。