"One Size Won't Fit All": How Can We Increase US Public Motivation to Participate in Policy Debate

Online media plays a vital role in how people interact and engage with political issues. The purpose of this research study is to investigate how news presentation characteristics (texts, images, and videos), news orientation characteristics (the degree of formality and attractiveness), and interactive features (commenting and sharing systems) affect U.S. public participation in online politics. A content analysis was performed using news articles from nine sources of political journalism. These news media are actively posting and feeding their news through the Facebook channel. Our analysis revealed that visual contents, such as image and video, are highly influential in engaging people in politics than cognitive contents, such as text. Also, the presence of comment and sharing tools has the most considerable share in attracting audiences to participate in policy discussion over the Internet compared to the presence of clear and informal news articles.