Negative news posts are less prevalent and generate lower user engagement than non-negative news posts across six countries
This research addresses the problem of understanding news negativity on social media for media organizations and policymakers, but it is incremental as it provides comparative evidence using existing methods.
The study analyzed 6 million Facebook posts from six countries to assess the prevalence and engagement of negative news, finding that negative posts constitute only 12.6% of content and receive 15% fewer likes and 13% fewer comments than non-negative posts.
Although news negativity is often studied, missing is comparative evidence on the prevalence of and engagement with negative political and non-political news posts on social media. We use 6,081,134 Facebook posts published between January 1, 2020, and April 1, 2024, by 97 media organizations in six countries (U.S., UK, Ireland, Poland, France, Spain) and develop two multilingual classifiers for labeling posts as (non-)political and (non-)negative. We show that: (1) negative news posts constitute a relatively small fraction (12.6%); (2) political news posts are neither more nor less negative than non-political news posts; (3) U.S. political news posts are less negative relative to the other countries on average (40% lower odds); (4) Negative news posts get 15% fewer likes and 13% fewer comments than non-negative news posts. Lastly, (5) we provide estimates of the proportion of the total volume of user engagement with negative news posts and show that only between 10.2% to 13.1% of engagement is linked to negative posts by the analyzed news organizations.