Diffusing Emotions Through Social Media
(Blog post inspired by CGP Grey’s video on this matter)
Emotions are powerful factors that can drive people to action or inaction. One of the more widespread effects that emotions can have involves catalyzing the spread of a viral post on various social media. Researchers have studied various emotions: anger, disgust, sadness, and joy, and have looked into their influence in helping a post spread. They’ve found that sadness and disgust do not contribute well to the rapid spread of emotions. It’s stated as a matter of fact that sadness did “little to affect the online mood of directly connected social media friends.” We’ll explore this idea more later.
Anger and joy however, did much more to increase the rate of spread of a particular post or idea throughout a social media platform. For joy, one of the articles states that “A happy tweet was far more likely to be shared by close connections.” And additionally, for anger, it was stated that “anger spread quickly among those who were closely connected.” In researching one of China’s premiere social media platforms, Weibo, researchers saw that the Chinese were “extremely rageful” in response to inflammatory incidents such as the United States and South Korea conducting military drills just off the coast of China out in the Yellow Sea. Likewise, the same occurrence in which anger spread rapidly through a social media network occurred as well when a Japanese and Chinese ship collided with one another, and when a tainted food additive was attributed to having caused a neurodegenerative disorder among Chinese people.
If we frame social media networks as a network diffusion problem, with each person as a node and friendships and interactions as edges, we can begin to understand better why certain emotions spread better than others. It’s stated in one of the articles that sadness is “a deactivating emotion.” Additionally, it’s stated that “Anger is a high-arousal emotion, which drives people to take action.” We can translate these emotions of sadness and anger to low and high payoffs, respectively. If we then take a look at our behavior diffusion network problem, we see that while sadness may have a chance to spread in sparser networks, among denser clusters of friends, sadness does not spread as virulently, hence, the quote of sadness doing “little to affect the online mood of directly connected social media friends,” holds true. At the same time, it’s people react to anger with greater fervor, and if we thus associate anger with a higher payoff, then it makes sense that anger can spread with greater speed and likelihood through even the densest of networks, hence, the quote that “anger spread quickly among those who were closely connected,” makes perfect sense and would explain why the entirety of Weibo erupted into outrage at the military drills that the United States and South Korea were conducting.
References:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/what-emotion-goes-viral-fastest-180950182/
https://www.nbcnews.com/technolog/your-social-media-emotions-go-viral-anger-spreads-fastest-4B11186087