Emotional Manipulation in the Era of Misinformation: Investigating the Interplay of Emotions, Fake News, and Social Media Algorithms, Anjali Kapoor, UG '24 (EB8536AD)

Fake news can have extremely harmful effects on society, such as increasing polarization, instilling distrust in the media and government, inciting violence, andencouraging dangerous health practices. Psychologists believe that fake news is effective because it incites an emotional response that clouds people’s judgment. Todive deeper into this theory, this study explores three related questions: Does fakenews utilize more emotional language than real news? Do social media reactions tofake news contain more emotional language than reactions to real news? And lastly,do social media algorithms amplify the spread of fake news? Results demonstratethat fake news articles as a whole utilize more emotional language than real news,and particularly more negative emotion, while headlines of fake versus real news articles contain comparable amounts of emotional language, with fake news headlinesskewing towards negative emotions and real news headlines skewing towards positiveemotions. Analyzing tweeted reactions to fake versus real news challenged psychologists’ beliefs that fake news incites more emotional reactions, as tweets reacting toreal news were found to contain more emotion than tweets reacting to fake news.Finally, this paper offers a novel approach to analyzing the connection between socialmedia algorithms and fake news virality: comparing top Reddit posts in r/politicsbefore and after Reddit implemented its suggested-content algorithm revealed thatits implementation correlated with an approximately 30% increase in fake news virality.Overall, my results provide more insight into the complex relationship between fakenews, social media algorithms, and emotions.