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Do Sarcastic News and Online Comments Make Readers Happier?

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Advances in Data Science and Information Engineering

Abstract

Newsvendors cultivate online communities to encourage online users’ comments worldwide. However, the incivility of online commenting is an important issue for both researchers and practitioners. This study focuses on the impact of news with and without online comments on readers’ emotions. An online experiment was designed with news sarcasm (sarcastic vs. neutral) and comments (civil, uncivil, and none) to examine participants’ emotions. Two pretests were administered to determine the target news and the incivility of online comments. Five hundred and twenty-nine subjects took part in the formal online experiment, and the results demonstrated both sarcasm in news and incivility in comments made readers significantly unhappy. The interaction effect between sarcasm in news and incivility in comments was also significant, implying that news might form a “frame” in readers’ minds and influence how they judge comments and emotions. Implications and discussions are also included.

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Correspondence to Jih-Hsin Tang .

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Tang, JH., Wei, CF., Chen, MC., Chang, CS. (2021). Do Sarcastic News and Online Comments Make Readers Happier?. In: Stahlbock, R., Weiss, G.M., Abou-Nasr, M., Yang, CY., Arabnia, H.R., Deligiannidis, L. (eds) Advances in Data Science and Information Engineering. Transactions on Computational Science and Computational Intelligence. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71704-9_49

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