Facts or feelings? Leveraging emotionality as a fact-checking strategy on social media in the United States

Summary

This paper interrogates a tension within social media fact-checking: although fact-checking is normatively framed as dispassionate, objective correction, in practice fact-checking posts often deploy emotional language. Drawing on social psychological accounts of message-level influence, Xue, Zhang, and Zhang examine how prevalent emotionality is in U.S. fact-checking posts and how it shapes both audience engagement with those posts and public sentiment toward the fact-checked targets. The authors argue that emotionality is not incidental but a consequential rhetorical feature that fact-checkers strategically — or inadvertently — leverage.

Key Contributions

• Documents the prevalence of emotional language in fact-checking posts, challenging the genre’s self-image of neutrality.
• Connects message-level emotional features to two distinct downstream outcomes: engagement metrics and target-directed sentiment.
• Bridges fact-checking scholarship with affective communication research, offering design implications for fact-checkers navigating the trade-off between perceived objectivity and reach.

Methods

The study uses computational/content analysis of U.S. social media fact-checking posts, operationalizing emotionality at the message level and relating it to observed engagement and audience sentiment outcomes. The analytic framework is grounded in social psychological theories of persuasive and emotional communication.

Findings

• Fact-checking posts routinely contain substantial emotional content rather than strictly neutral framing.
• Emotionality is systematically associated with audience engagement patterns.
• Emotional framing also shifts public sentiment toward the targets being fact-checked, indicating spillover effects beyond engagement.

Connections

This work speaks directly to debates about fact-checking efficacy and design seen in DeVerna2025-dl and Cazzamatta2026-lo, and complements inoculation- and correction-focused research such as van-der-Linden2026-jt and Spampatti2026-kx. Its emphasis on affective message features also connects to studies of emotionally charged misinformation discourse like Frischlich2025-vn and engagement-driven dynamics analyzed in Mosleh2024-op.