We offer theory and evidence regarding the impact of content ideology (i.e., emotionally charged beliefs expressed in sentiments) on opinion polarization (i.e., conflicting attitudes about an event) on social media. Specifically, we consider the moderating role of functional affordances and symbolic expressions to draw inferences about opinion polarization. From a sentiment analysis of 3600 posts and a survey of 468 Weibo users, we find that content ideology is positively related to social media opinion polarization. The effect of content ideology is greater when users receive stronger symbolic expressions. Further, our results show an insignificant moderating relationship between functional affordances and this effect. The findings suggest that it is critical to consider content ideology and symbolic expressions when assessing the relationship between published content and polarized opinions on social media.

我们提供了关于内容意识形态（即情绪中表达的情绪化信念）对社交媒体上意见两极分化（即对事件的冲突态度）的影响的理论和证据。具体来说，我们考虑了功能可供性和符号表达的调节作用，以得出关于意见两极分化的推论。通过对 3600 个帖子的情绪分析和对 468 位微博用户的调查，我们发现内容意识形态与社交媒体舆论两极分化正相关。当用户接收到更强的符号表达时，内容意识形态的影响更大。此外，我们的结果表明，功能可供性与这种效应之间存在不显着的调节关系。