Fear and Loathing on Social Media: How Interest Groups Use Emotion to Mobilize

• In Event: Political Organizations Online and in Print

Abstract

Social media is becoming an increasing important tool for policy advocacy. Interest groups and advocacy organizations are active social media users. Obar, Zube, and Lampe (2012) found through a survey that almost all of the advocacy groups within their sample used Facebook or Twitter; two-thirds of these groups stated they used these sites every day. These interest groups stated one of the reasons for social media adoption was to help mobilize citizens, yet little is known about exactly how interest groups use social media to advance their policy agendas. Studies of social media uses outside of the context of interest groups show that the content which receives the most engagement is content which furthers controversy, misinformation, polarization and extremism (Hao 2021). Past research also shows that interest groups often use emotional content to mobilize individuals to act in regards to particular issues. Emotions such as anger and blame have been associated with all sorts of collective action and social movements (Goodwin et al. 2000; Zomeren et al. 2004; Gamson 1992). Further, theories of group threat indicate that the fear of losing social position motivates people to change their policy positions (King and Wheelock 2007). In other words, negative emotions play a clear role in mobilizing individuals around issues and policies. For these reasons, we can expect interest groups, which are rational and strategic, to use negative emotions to their advantage when attempting to mobilize supporters on social media. However, this might not be the same for every policy issue. Anger and fear are much more associated with social movements which revolve around protests and group identity. Therefore, we expect that negative emotions will be more used by interest groups when posting around divisive social issues than it is with more mundane economic issues. We test these expectations using an original dataset of over 10 million tweets and nearly 3 million Facebook posts by over 1,500 U.S. interest groups from 2016 to 2020. This study provides new insights into how interest groups use this critical new advocacy tool.

Authors

• Kirsten Widner, University of Tennessee, Knoxville

• Justin Rose

• Maggie Macdonald, New York University

• Anna M Gunderson, Louisiana State University