Journalist Zaid Jilani on Monday broke down new research that examined engagement on social media posts from the most politically charged accounts, and concluded that “negative stuff really, really works” in terms of going viral.
A team of researchers from the University of Cambridge and New York University published an article last week that analyzed more than 2.7 million social media posts from news accounts and members of Congress to determine if out-group animosity, referring to one group attacking another, was successful at generating engagement on Facebook and Twitter.
“The thing that performed the best across ideologies, across these platforms, was talking about an out-group, you know, that means a liberal talking about a conservative, a conservative talking about a liberal, particularly when they were using like negative or kind of moral or emotional words, you know, basically when they were attacking, right, when they were, you know, dunking as the parlance on Twitter or they were flaming as the parlance may be elsewhere on the internet,” Jilani said during an interview on Hill.TV’s “Rising.”
“The way on any kind of political social media to get out there, to be viral, to increase your clout, is to be attacking somebody who’s in the opposite tribe or camp from you politically,” he later added.
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