Anwar, S., & Giglietto, F. (2024). Facebook reactions in the context of politics and social issues: a systematic literature review. Frontiers in Sociology. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2024.1379265
Summary
This systematic literature review synthesizes 64 peer-reviewed articles published between 2016 and 2023 that examine user engagement with Facebook’s Reactions feature (Love, Haha, Wow, Sad, Angry), introduced in February 2016 as an expansion of the Like button. Anwar and Giglietto organize the literature into three thematic clusters — the introduction of Reactions, politics and far-right groups, and other social issues — and conduct a meta-analytic reading of cross-study patterns. The central argument is that Reactions function as paralinguistic digital affordances that provide a low-effort but semantically richer emotional vocabulary than the Like button, and that this vocabulary systematically varies by content type: lifestyle and entertainment content elicits predominantly positive reactions, while political and controversial content draws a broader, more negative emotional spectrum, with anger in particular driving engagement for populist and far-right actors.
Key Contributions
- First comprehensive systematic synthesis of Facebook Reactions research spanning 2016–2023 across politics, health, business, and psychology domains.
- Proposes a thematic taxonomy organizing a fragmented, interdisciplinary literature into coherent categories.
- Identifies cross-study regularities, especially the role of negative emotion (particularly anger) in amplifying engagement with political and populist content.
- Diagnoses methodological gaps: fragmented data sources, limited cross-cultural comparison, and underexploration of event-based and tabloid content.
- Suggests future directions, including the use of large language models for categorizing reaction patterns and applications in misinformation and digital activism research.
Methods
The authors follow Briner and Denyer’s (2012) five-step systematic review protocol: formulating research questions, finding studies, selecting and evaluating them, analyzing findings, and reporting. Searches were conducted monthly (July–September 2023) in Scopus, Google Scholar, and other engines, using Boolean combinations of “Facebook” and “Reaction.” Inclusion was restricted to peer-reviewed journal articles and conference proceedings (2016–2023), yielding 64 articles. Each article was read and thematically coded via Armstrong’s (2010) comparative naturalistic method, then grouped into three macro-categories with finer sub-topics (political news, populism, healthcare, business, emotion detection).
Findings
- Of 64 articles: 6 on the introduction of Reactions, 19 on politics and far-right groups, 39 on other social issues.
- Negative emotional appeals — especially anger — generate significantly more engagement and sharing than positive content in political campaigns (Mexico, Brexit, EU Parliament elections).
- Populist and far-right leaders receive disproportionately more Angry and Haha reactions than mainstream politicians; anger-triggering messaging boosts sharing.
- In hyperpartisan and junk news, Love and Anger rarely co-occur, while Anger tends to co-occur with Sad and Wow — a bivalent emotional logic.
- Reactions can proxy controversy (via entropy of reaction distributions), sentiment polarity, and emotion classes, though mappings are ambiguous (e.g., Wow as disbelief; Haha as mockery).
- Reactions serve as useful sentiment labels in low-resource languages (Sinhala, Bangla).
- Cultural context shapes reaction patterns, as in comparisons of China-critical, China-supporting, and neutral media audiences in Hong Kong.
- Lifestyle/entertainment posts skew positive; sociopolitical posts draw wider, more negative emotional profiles.
Connections
This review consolidates a research strand that intersects directly with Giglietto’s own program on Facebook-based political communication and coordinated behavior, including Giglietto2019-882f1900, Giglietto2020-9d8acdd7, Giglietto2022-b30e8b4e, Giglietto2023-fa71a001, and Giglietto2024-cbeb3f70, and it aligns with earlier work on Facebook’s affective and engagement logics such as Iannelli2015-e0818c3e and Iannelli2018-ebd918b7. Its emphasis on anger-driven engagement with populist and junk-news content connects to broader debates on partisan amplification and platform-mediated discourse addressed in Freelon2024-sc and Gonzalez-Bailon2024-rq.