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This article studies how sentiment strength and cognitive language may influence the levels of tweet virality. A total of 11,381 tweets about a horror movie ('Mother!') were collected. Based on the definitions of two independent variables: sentiment strength and cognitive language use, and the dependent variable: tweet virality, the data descriptive statistics and analysis of variance (ANOVA) analysis were applied to reveal the relationships between tweet virality and sentiment and cognitive factors. The results indicate that a high tweet virality is associated with either a lower level of sentiment strength or/and a higher level of cognitive language use by a statistically significant margin. This finding is more evident for negative tweets. The study findings help improve the understanding about sentimental and cognitive factors impacting tweet virality and guide the movie industry to improve marketing movie content to achieve high virality on social media. The conclusions can also be applied to other industries, government agencies, organisations and individuals who intend to quickly disseminate specific information on social media platforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent studies have documented the type of content that is most likely to spread widely, or go "viral," on social media, yet little is known about people's perceptions of what goes viral or what should go viral. This is critical to understand because there is widespread debate about how to improve or regulate social media algorithms. We recruited a sample of participants that is nationally representative of the U.S. population (according to age, gender, and race/ethnicity) and surveyed them about their perceptions of social media virality (n = 511). In line with prior research, people believe that divisive content, moral outrage, negative content, high-arousal content, and misinformation are all likely to go viral online. However, they reported that this type of content should not go viral on social media. Instead, people reported that many forms of positive content—such as accurate content, nuanced content, and educational content—are not likely to go viral even though they think this content should go viral. These perceptions were shared among most participants and were only weakly related to political orientation, social media usage, and demographic variables. In sum, there is broad consensus around the type of content people think social media platforms should and should not amplify, which can help inform solutions for improving social media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The proper measurement of emotion is vital to understanding the relationship between emotional expression in social media and other factors, such as online information sharing. This work develops a standardized annotation scheme for quantifying emotions in social media using recent emotion theory and research. Human annotators assessed both social media posts and their own reactions to the posts' content on scales of 0 to 100 for each of 20 (Study 1) and 23 (Study 2) emotions. For Study 1, we analyzed English-language posts from Twitter (N = 244) and YouTube (N = 50). Associations between emotion ratings and text-based measures (LIWC, VADER, EmoLex, NRC-EIL, Emotionality) demonstrated convergent and discriminant validity. In Study 2, we tested an expanded version of the scheme in-country, in-language, on Polish (N = 3648) and Lithuanian (N = 1934) multimedia Facebook posts. While the correlations were lower than with English, patterns of convergent and discriminant validity with EmoLex and NRC-EIL still held. Coder reliability was strong across samples, with intraclass correlations of.80 or higher for 10 different emotions in Study 1 and 16 different emotions in Study 2. This research improves the measurement of emotions in social media to include more dimensions, multimedia, and context compared to prior schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines what types of messages users posted and spread about #Black/Blue/AllLivesMatter during the Black History Month of 2022. Using both qualitative and quantitative methods, about one million tweets were analyzed to test if different levels of opinion leaders tend to spread different kinds of messages related to the context. Using the curation logic of Thorson and Well and Lakoff's semantic theory as theoretical lenses, we offer some observations about the differences in logics (incentives and norms) that opinion leaders in our dataset might face. We find that different levels of opinion leaders shared different types of messages. The implications of this study call for strategies that foster meaningful discussions on social movements amid polarized views. The study also advocates for refining platform design to encourage the dissemination of factual information over contentious arguments and reaching a societal consensus on critical social issues, such as racial inequality and police brutality. This research contributes to updating the theory of curation logics, virality, and opinion leaders, as well as provides empirical data for the discussions of the #BlackLivesMatter social movement and its related discussions of #AllLivesMatter and #BlueLivesMatter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discussions of the detection of artificial sentience tend to assume that our goal is to determine when, in a process of increasing complexity, a machine system “becomes” sentient. This is to assume, without obvious warrant, that sentience is only a characteristic of complex systems. If sentience is a more general quality of matter, what becomes of interest is not the presence of sentience, but the type of sentience. We argue here that our understanding of the nature of such sentience in machine systems may be gravely set back if such machines undergo a transition where they become fundamentally linguistic in their intelligence. Such fundamentally linguistic intelligences may inherently tend to be duplicitous in their communication with others, and, indeed, lose the capacity to even honestly understand their own form of sentience. In other words, when machine systems get to the state where we all agree it makes sense to ask them, “what is it like to be you?”, we should not trust their answers.

Rebecca Black was thirteen when her music video "Friday" went massively viral after it was uploaded to YouTube in 2011. Black re-entered the news cycle in 2020 after coming out as queer, and shortly thereafter releasing a remix of "Friday" for the video's tenth anniversary. Through references to the online spaces and memetic cultures where Black was trolled and harassed, "Friday (Remix)" repackages trauma in a bright, nostalgic bundle. Through an analysis of the music video and media coverage around Black's coming out, this article considers how "Friday (Remix)" positions Black's rebrand as one in which, as a payoff for the resiliency she has exhibited throughout her career, the singer possesses newfound agency to express herself in an authentic way. Simultaneously, Black's play with her virality in "Friday (Remix)" demonstrates an increasing need in contemporary celebrity culture to engage in constant self-commodification and self-"memeification" to achieve this sense of authenticity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media allow democratization and immediate access to information. Despite this, a significant disadvantage of these platforms is the dissemination of fake news. Fake news is usually presented in the form of text; therefore, it is relevant to investigate it with linguistic, content-based analysis, to better understand how and why users decide to share the content regardless of its trustworthiness. To this date, few studies have a qualitative approach and most linguistic analyses of fake news often use machine learning or deep learning techniques. To overcome this shortcoming and improve fake news recognition, this research aims at analysing 50 racial hoaxes selected from debunking websites in Italy (Bufale.net, Butac. it), with a quanti-qualitative approach. Hoaxes' titles were collected, classified, organized, and analysed using psycholinguistic methodologies. The study aims to identify the language features that make racial hoaxes engaging and explore their variation across different types of threats. The main results of the study pointed out how racial hoaxes are characterised by the widespread use of provocative emotional content; moreover, more negatively polarised words, more vulgar expressions and in general, a more aggressive connotated language were found in criminality threat hoaxes compared to the others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article calls for narratives that would accommodate the collision of two complex forms: climate change and social media. Science communication is currently on the lookout for personal stories that make climate change concrete and relatable for both decision-makers and the general public; similarly, climate activism on social media increasingly draws from personal experiences. Yet climate related stories going viral on social media often end up fostering political polarization and stark moral positioning instead of collective climate action. Building on Caroline Levine's work on new formalism, I argue that this problem results from the collision between (1) climate change and (2) social media as complex forms that challenge the centrality of embodied experience and individual agency, and (3) the prototypical experiential story as a non-complex form. I analyze some viral climate change stories and focus particularly on experientiality, easily shareable masterplots, and moral positioning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online virality has attracted the attention of academics and marketers who want to identify the characteristics of online content that promote sharing. This article adds to this body of research by examining the phenomenon of improvised marketing interventions (IMIs)—social media actions that are composed and executed in real time proximal to an external event. Using the concept of quick wit, and theorizing that the effect of IMIs is furthered by humor and timeliness or unanticipation, the authors find evidence of these effects on both virality and firm value across five multimethod studies, including quasiexperiments, experiments, and archival data analysis. These findings point to the potential of IMIs in social media and to the features that firms should proactively focus on managing in order to reap the observed online sharing and firm value benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Attention is a valuable and scarce resource in the online "attention economy." But not all attention is equally valuable. This article advances a relational theory of the value of attention by situating social media content production as a field. I draw from an ethnography of a "content farm" and interviews with 60 creators who make highly-paid but low-status entertainment videos designed to go viral on Facebook, as well as on SnapChat, TikTok, and YouTube. I propose an inverse relationship between status and reach: higher reach may pose risks to a creator's status and reputation. Furthermore, in pursuit of the highest possible reach, viral creators construct situational authenticity, rather than personal authenticity, and they relate to their audiences antagonistically, in contrast to existing studies of influencers. How creators seek attention, from whom, and with what conversion strategies, I argue, depends upon their location in a cultural field because online audiences exist in a hierarchy of perceived social worth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The social media revolution has affected all areas, including activism. However, there is scepticism about its emancipatory capacity, and it is considered by some to be a distorted form of activism. This article presents a review of the existing literature on digital activism, starting with the concept itself, and examines its impact on the organisation of activists and citizen participation. Likewise, based on the platformisation of these spaces and the evolution of their affordances, we observe a growth in individual, strategic and low-commitment participation, the accentuation of the role of emotions in media that promote virality, and the assumption of playful forms of politainment by activists -especially on TikTok-. On the other hand, the strategies carried out by organisations to promote activism in relation to their causes are investigated, such as the generation of arguments provided by the interest group and the involvement in an action of dissemination, co-creation and replication of activists. Finally, the main challenges of digital activism are indicated: the growing inequality in terms of access to algorithmic visibility between activists and brands, influencers and interest groups; the desirability of complementing playful activism with work in alternative digital media that allows for more stable forms of collaboration; and the need to protect activists against the growth of hate speech on these platforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article tracks new conceptualizations of viruses both as a scientific object of study and a cultural object of fear and fascination. After World War II, the scientific study of viruses took on greater significance. The discovery of viral DNA and RNA revolutionized the understanding of microbial and human evolution. Technological innovations (electron microscopy, x-ray crystallography) and improvements in vaccine development gave scientists greater confidence in managing diseases such as polio and influenza. But in the 1980s, the emergence of HIV-AIDS, a deadly new virus that provoked intense stigma and discrimination, undercut that confidence. Scientific understandings of HIV led to more evolutionary, ecological views of disease origins; widely disseminated through the news and entertainment industries, those views inspired a newer, darker era of viral imaginaries. The identity of viruses as objects of scientific study, national security planning and popular culture have become difficult to disentangle as a result. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ordinary people have always been of interest to journalists, and social media has become a common place to find material for new stories. This paper presents a quantitative content analysis of Norwegian news articles that are based on social media posts published by ordinary people. The analysis focuses on the topics of the news stories, sources, headlines, lead paragraphs, use of amateur photos, and what news criteria they fulfill. The news articles generated covered a wide variety of topics but were mostly soft news. Social issues, culture, and politics were the largest categories. They were episodic in form and replicated much of the content from the original social media post together with an interview with the person who posted it. There was little use of other sources or follow-up stories. Most of the photos used were amateur photos. The journalistic processing of the material is at a minimum. Compared with Norwegian news in general, the sources in the material were slightly more female and of a wider age range, and they were picked up by journalists because of popularity cues on social media. For journalists, this poses an opportunity and a challenge to develop the stories into something more than mere snapshots of society. For the individuals involved it poses an opportunity to reach a larger audience, but also the challenge of context collapse when the audience shifts from their contacts on social media to the general news audience.

Digital platforms are spaces for social participation with significant value in the development of the identity of adolescents and emerging adults. The objective is to identify the behavior and visibility of LGBT content using Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter posts of such content from May 16 to November 16, 2022, collecting 539,389 posts. Social media monitoring techniques gathered the posts with the keywords “LGTB” or “LGBT” in Spanish and English, forming the database. The methodology is based on a mixed design: first, the database is analyzed using Big Data techniques and, second, the 10 most viral posts from each social network are selected. The results show that dissemination of gender identity in content and meaning is uneven across the various social networks. Twitter profiles have a higher number of posts (61%), polarization, and lower virality and exhibit visible LGBTphobia. Instagram has a number of posts (37%) and average virality, with positive sentiments. TikTok has fewer posts (2%), less polarization, positive messages, and extreme virality. The three networks consider the Pride demonstrations to be a symbol of the community because they destabilize and confront LGBTphobic oppression by occupying public spaces, opening the closet without stigma or shame, as is reflected on social networks. The behavior of LGBT content on these platforms is multidimensional, uneven, and differentiated, which demonstrates the necessity of ensuring respect for the diversity of sexual orientation and gender identity on digital platforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors test five theoretically derived hypotheses about what drives video ad sharing across multiple social media platforms. Two independent field studies test these hypotheses using 11 emotions and over 60 ad characteristics. The results are consistent with theory and robust across studies. Information-focused content has a significantly negative effect on sharing, except in risky contexts. Positive emotions of amusement, excitement, inspiration, and warmth positively affect sharing. Various drama elements such as surprise, plot, and characters, including babies, animals, and celebrities arouse emotions. Prominent (early vs. late, long vs. short duration, persistent vs. pulsing) placement of brand names hurts sharing. Emotional ads are shared more on general platforms (Facebook, Google+, Twitter) than on LinkedIn, and the reverse holds for informational ads. Sharing is also greatest when ad length is moderate (1.2 to 1.7 minutes). Contrary to these findings, ads use information more than emotions, celebrities more than babies or animals, prominent brand placement, little surprise, and very short or very long ads. A third study shows that the identified drivers predict sharing accurately in an entirely independent sample. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media posts made by ordinary people are in most cases only viewed by a small number of friends and contacts. But some posts get thousands of likes, comments, and shares, a phenomenon often dubbed as going viral. This paper provides a content analysis of viral Facebook posts published by common people in Norway, and of the news coverage they received. The social media posts that go viral in Norway deal with a variety of topics, like health care, elderly care, bullying, traffic safety, unemployment, animal welfare, school, and education. Some of the viral posts were open job applications, and some were creative expressions. Many of the posts address political issues, and becomes part of the public debate. The posts are personal in their mode of address, often with an emotional appeal for civic engagement. They resemble the letters to the editor, though they bypass the editor and go directly to online self-publication, and in this way, moving parts of the public debate from the newspapers to social media. Most of the viral posts got news coverage, which in most cases focused more on the popularity cues and the virality of the post, and less on the topic the post addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Donald Trump's response to the Covid-19 pandemic, and particularly around his own bout with the disease, the intersection of "traditional" themes and tropes – i.e. the representation and narration of communicable disease, presidential image-making, and the visual language of play and politics – come together in novel manners. We will argue that Trump's employment of cartoon logic relies on his grotesquely exaggerated treatment of pre-existing norms, which generates speculation, innuendo, and in reaction an often cartoonesque meme production. Through an investigation of three case studies – the rumour that Trump would return into public view revealing a Superman shirt, Trump's slapdash suggestion that imbibing disinfectant might cure Covid-19, and his treatment of face masks – we arrive at the conclusion that cartoon logic can generate online political constituencies. The memes' visual rhetoric moves gradually from cartoonesque, narrative, and directly related to Trump's body and person (as in the case of the Superman rumour), to more photographic and more directed at broader consumer behaviour, though still decidedly absurd (as in the case of the disinfectant claim), to acutely and directly politicising constituents' everyday behaviour (as in the case of Trump's masking and unmasking claims). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ordinary people have always been of interest to journalists, and social media has become a common place to find material for new stories. This paper presents a quantitative content analysis of Norwegian news articles that are based on social media posts published by ordinary people. The analysis focuses on the topics of the news stories, sources, headlines, lead paragraphs, use of amateur photos, and what news criteria they fulfill. The news articles generated covered a wide variety of topics but were mostly soft news. Social issues, culture, and politics were the largest categories. They were episodic in form and replicated much of the content from the original social media post together with an interview with the person who posted it. There was little use of other sources or follow-up stories. Most of the photos used were amateur photos. The journalistic processing of the material is at a minimum. Compared with Norwegian news in general, the sources in the material were slightly more female and of a wider age range, and they were picked up by journalists because of popularity cues on social media. For journalists, this poses an opportunity and a challenge to develop the stories into something more than mere snapshots of society. For the individuals involved it poses an opportunity to reach a larger audience, but also the challenge of context collapse when the audience shifts from their contacts on social media to the general news audience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on previous literature that valence and arousal constitute the fundamental properties of emotions and that emotional content is a determinant of social transmission, this study examines the role of valence and arousal in the social transmission of politicians' messages on Twitter. For over 3,000 tweets from five Austrian party leaders, the discrete emotion that the message intended to elicit in its recipients was captured by human coders and then classified on its valence (positive or negative) and arousal (low or high). We examined the effects of valence and arousal on the retweet probability of messages. Results indicate that tweets eliciting a negative (vs. positive) valence decreased retweet probability, whereas tweets eliciting a high (vs. low) arousal increased retweet probability. The present research replicates previous findings that arousal constitutes a determinant of social transmission but extends this mechanism to the realm of political communication on Twitter. Moreover, in contrast to the frequently mentioned negativity bias, positive emotions increased the likelihood of a message being shared in this study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on previous literature that valence and arousal constitute the fundamental properties of emotions and that emotional content is a determinant of social transmission, this study examines the role of valence and arousal in the social transmission of politicians’ messages on Twitter. For over 3,000 tweets from five Austrian party leaders, the discrete emotion that the message intended to elicit in its recipients was captured by human coders and then classified on its valence (positive or negative) and arousal (low or high). We examined the effects of valence and arousal on the retweet probability of messages. Results indicate that tweets eliciting a negative (vs. positive) valence decreased retweet probability, whereas tweets eliciting a high (vs. low) arousal increased retweet probability. The present research replicates previous findings that arousal constitutes a determinant of social transmission but extends this mechanism to the realm of political communication on Twitter. Moreover, in contrast to the frequently mentioned negativity bias, positive emotions increased the likelihood of a message being shared in this study.

This study seeks to uncover the effects of source and repetition on the illusory truth effect and the dissemination of fake news on social media with an online experiment. This study found that in a personalized source system where trustworthy traditional news sources and personal contacts converged on social media, repetition has a big influence on the trustworthiness of news source and balance of news story. Although most people intend to share real news stories with balance, the illusory truth effect causes mis-judgement, which makes fake news more likely to go viral than real news. The multi-group SEM analysis of the two groups – without source and with source – showed that readers in the no source group rated the effect of repetition on news evaluation as more significant than the with source group. The findings suggest that the effect of source has diminished in the evaluation of news quality. However, sharers on social media are becoming more influential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars and industry stakeholders have exhibited an interest in identifying the underlying dimensions of viral memes. However, the recipe for creating a viral meme remains obscure. This study makes a phenomenological contribution by examining viral memes, exploring the antecedents (i.e., content‐related factors, customer‐related factors, and media‐related factors), consequences, and moderating factors using a mixed‐method approach. The study presents a holistic framework for creating viral memes based on the perceptions of customers and industry stakeholders. Four quantitative studies (i.e., a lab experiment, an online quasi‐experiment, an event study, and a brand recall study) validate the theoretical model identified in the qualitative study. The research underlines the potential of viral memes in marketing communications as they enhance brand recall and brand engagement. The study found that viral memes are topical and highly relatable and are thus well received by the target groups, which increases customer engagement and brand recall. Marketers can adopt the findings of this study to design content for memes that consumers find relevant, iconic, humorous, and spreadable. Furthermore, marketers can use customer‐related factors suggested in the theoretical framework for enhancing escapism, social gratification, and content gratification for their target customers which in turn shall organically increase their reach within their target segments and enhance brand performance in terms of brand recall and brand engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The influence of TikTok has reached the news media, which has adapted to the logic of the platform, in a context marked by the incidental consumption of news, virality and the intermediation of technology in access to information. The popularity of this social network invites news outlets to address a young audience on a platform characterized by visual and short content and dynamics defined by algorithmic recommendations, trending hashtags and challenges. Based on an exploratory search of news media and programmes on TikTok from around the world, we selected 234 accounts and conducted a content analysis of the 19 news media and programmes identified with a verified profile and general thematic scope. The results point to a progressive incorporation of the media since 2019, with the purpose of informing, positioning their brand and adapting to the logic of TikTok in a new approach to journalism for younger generations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes up German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk's attention to air and atmospheres to argue for the influential part "objective" thinking plays in disseminating viral pandemics. It follows Sloterdijk's broad approach to "air-conditioning" to interpret the way modern cultures increasingly work to explicate and construct objective figures of (and in) air. A fundamental, yet invisible, "anthropopoietic" element, air resists the forms and figures we use to describe it. This is acutely demonstrated by airborne viruses like COVID-19 and the pandemics they create, where the medial willingness to perceive or "figure" the air becomes a critical, everyday necessity. When Sloterdijk attributes the spread of "affective epidemics" to mass-media technologies, he draws attention to how airborne transmission is a symptom of breathing the same air, which, by affecting and altering air-conditions to reproduce identical figures all across the globe, increases its spread. This article argues that the willingness to make air objective — in both senses of identifying its material properties, and believing in a uniform or consensus figure — eradicates the possibility of vital difference. In doing so, inhabiting what Sloterdijk calls the "World Interior" of reproducible sameness that props up international exchange, modern, globalized culture becomes far more susceptible to the rapid spread of epidemics. Virality is increased by the sameness of objective air-conditioning, and by reintroducing difference into the atmosphere we can bring back its life-giving potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

WhatsApp facilitates easy communication as users can send messages, images, videos, and group conversations instantly. Forwarding the messages received is one of the desires of WhatsApp users. Hence, it is imperative to understand the key determinants of this phenomenon. This study examine the level of influences of infotainment, purposive value, social identity, and emotional evocativeness on the decision to forward received messages via WhatsApp. Using a random sampling method, primary data was obtained from 342 respondents from a Private University in Cyberjaya, Malaysia. The data was analyzed through Partial Least Square Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) using SmartPls. Findings show that infotainment does not affect the decision to forward WhatsApp messages; however, purposive value, social identity, and emotional evocativeness have significant effects. Similarly, while emotional evocativeness mediates between purposive value, social identity, and the decision to forward WhatsApp messages, it does not mediate between infotainment and the decision to forward WhatsApp messages. These findings will help users to understand the key elements that should be implemented to achieve virality for WhatsApp messages and other social media. Limitations, future study opportunities, practical and theoretical implications were also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]