Hashtag burnout? A control experiment investigating how political hashtags shape reactions to news content

Both hashtag activists and news organizations assume that trending political hashtags effectively capture the nowness of social issues that people care about [20]. In fact, news organizations with growing social media presence increasingly capitalize the use of political hashtags in article headlines and social media news post – a practice aimed to generate new readership through lightweight news consumption of content by linking a particular story to a broader topic [28]. However, response to political hashtags can be complicated as demonstrated with the events surrounding #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter. In fact, the semantic simplicity of political hashtags often belies the complexities around the question of who gets to participate [71], what intersectional identities are included or excluded from the hashtag [45], as well as how the meaning of the hashtag expands and drifts [10] depending on the context through which it is expressed. Overtime, reports show increasing backlash [70, 73, 74] and polarization [21, 52, 66, 67, 70] against key issues embodied by political hashtags. In this vein, we assume that political hashtags affect how people make sense of and engage with media content. However, we do not know how the presence of political hashtags –signaling that a news story is related to a current social issue – influences the assumptions potential readers make about the social content of an article. In this work we conducted a randomized control experiment to examine how the presence of political hashtags (particularly the most prevalently used #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter) in social media news posts shape reactions across a general audience (n=1979). Our findings show that compared to the control group, people shown news posts with political hashtags perceive the news topic as less socially important and are less motivated to know more about social issues related to the post. People also find the news more partisan and controversial when hashtags are included. In fact, negative perception associated with political hashtags (partisan bias & topic controversy) mediates people’s motivation to further engage with the news content). High-intensity Facebook users and politically moderate participants perceive news with political hashtags as more partisan compared to posts excluding hashtags. There are also significant differences in discourse patterns between the hashtag and control groups around how politically moderate respondents engage with the news content in their comments. Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM.