ABSTRACT

Previous research demonstrates that conflict framing in news articles can influence individuals’ attention, selection, and distribution of news. However, no study has examined whether the valence of social media comment fields can trigger similar effects for news engagement on Facebook. In this mixed-methods study, we combine eye tracking with surveys, and conduct an experiment in which participants (n = 96) were exposed to 20 Facebook news posts from the Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet. Under each post, we presented participants with a pair of real (but anonymized) Facebook comments that were either in agreement or disagreement with one another. We then examined how this manipulation influenced participants’ visual attention to comment fields, their self-reported likelihood to click on the post to read the full story, and their self-reported likelihood to share the news post to their Facebook network. Our results show that comments in disagreement increased users’ visual attention to comments, decreased their likelihood to share the post, and had no effect on their likelihood to read the news article associated with the post. Thus, the presence of disagreement in comments does cue news engagement on Facebook, but the effect is not uniform across different news engagement behaviors. Moreover, engagement with hard versus soft news topics also varied. Disagreement in comments to Facebook posts about soft news topics (Entertainment, Society, and Sports) increased users’ attention to the comments field. In contrast, comment disagreement for hard news topics (Economy and Politics) reduced users’ attention to the comment field, as well as their self-reported likelihood to read the post.

摘要

先前的研究表明，新闻文章中的冲突框架会影响个人对新闻的关注、选择和传播。然而，没有研究检查社交媒体评论字段的效价是否会触发 Facebook 上新闻参与的类似效果。在这项混合方法研究中，我们将眼动追踪与调查相结合，并进行了一项实验，参与者 ( n  = 96) 接触了瑞典小报Aftonbladet的 20 条 Facebook 新闻帖子. 在每篇文章下，我们向参与者展示了一对真实的（但匿名的）Facebook 评论，这些评论要么彼此同意，要么不同意。然后，我们检查了这种操作如何影响参与者对评论字段的视觉注意力、他们自我报告的点击帖子阅读全文的可能性以及他们自我报告的将新闻帖子分享到他们的 Facebook 网络的可能性。我们的结果表明，不同意见的评论增加了用户对评论的视觉关注，降低了他们分享帖子的可能性，并且对他们阅读与帖子相关的新闻文章的可能性没有影响。因此，评论中存在的分歧确实暗示了 Facebook 上的新闻参与，但不同新闻参与行为的影响并不统一。而且，硬新闻和软新闻主题的互动也各不相同。对有关软新闻主题（娱乐、社会和体育）的 Facebook 帖子的评论分歧增加了用户对评论领域的关注。相比之下，硬新闻主题（经济和政治）的评论分歧降低了用户对评论领域的关注，以及他们自我报告阅读帖子的可能性。