Emotional Profiles of Facebook Pages: Audience Response to Political News in Hong Kong

As social media becomes a major channel of news access, emotions have emerged as a significant factor of news distribution. However, the influence of cultural differences on the relationship between emotions and news sharing remains understudied. This paper investigates the impact of cultural disparities on emotional responses to political news in Hong Kong. We introduce the notion of “emotional profile” to capture cultural differences in the level and structure of audiences’ emotional responses to political topics on Facebook news pages. The study was conducted at a highly significant political moment in the former British colony when the National Security Law (NSL) was passed. The study found that readers of China-critical news pages on Facebook express the highest emotional intensity while readers of China’s media in Hong Kong express the lowest emotional intensity, and readers of China-supporting media fall in between. Readers of China-critical Facebook news pages express the most anger, but their political news sharing is correlated the most with “wow” and “sad” reactions. In contrast, readers of Facebook pages of China’s media in Hong Kong are more likely to react with “love”, which is also the emotion most associated with their political news sharing. The notion of “emotional profile” helps discover similarities within and differences across political boundaries of the news ecosystem. We interpret the results with the help of recent scholarly understanding of emotional expression on social media within Hong Kong’s political context.