10.000 Facebook Users Cannot Be Wrong. The Effects of Popularity Cues and User Comments on Sharing Controversial Facebook News Stories

A growing part of the population gets political information through social media. Compared to traditional news sources, news use on social media like Facebook are a much more social experience (Dvir-Gvirsman, 2019; Messing and Westwood, 2014): on the one hand, news stories on social media are accompanied by cues of how the content was perceived and appreciated by other users, in the form of user comments and popularity cues (such as the number of likes, shares and comments of Facebook). On the other hand, social media users do not only have the chance to read story on social media, they can also like them, share them with others or comment on them. This in turn affects whether others will see these posts. Taking this social experience as a starting point, this paper asks how do popularity cues and user comments affect people’s willingness to read, ‘like’, share and comment on a news stories about a controversial topic on social media? The social aspect of news on social media is expected to have strong impact on the type of information which is read and spread on social media. When people see that a lot of other people have rated a news story positively or expressed their disapproval of a news story, a bandwagon effect is triggered and people align their own perception of the quality of the story with the opinion indicated by the popularity cue (Sundar, 2008; Xu, 2013). User comments also affect people’s perception of a news post. In line with exemplification theory (Zerback and Fawzi, 2017; Zillmann, 2002), user comments provide vivid examples which are seen as expressions of the general public opinion on the post. This in turn affects people’s perception of the posts. Due to the social nature of news on social media, people are very aware about the perceptions of others when they decide to like, share or comment on news on social media. People use these possibilities actively as a form of impression management or to express their support for a specific cause (also called ‘clicktivism’ or ‘click speech’ (e.g. Ohme et al. 2018; Pang et al., 2016). they might actively refrain from expressing their opinion because they fear that others may disagree (e.g. Neubaum and Krämer, 2018). This leads to the expectation that the spreading of news on social media is strongly influenced by popularity cues and user comments. This expectation will be studied in a 2 x 2 x 2 experiment where 1200 Danish Facebook users are exposed to a news post about the legalization of euthanasia where the valence of the news story, number of popularity cues and valence of user comments are varied. After exposure their public opinion perceptions about the issue will be measured as well as their willingness to share the post or comment on it. The experiment will be preregistered and data will be collected in the spring of the 2020. The results give insight into spiral-of-silence dynamics in public opinion expression on social media.