Anger is the most influential emotion on social media, a recent study shows, and negative online reactions to the Miss America pageant results seem to reinforce the findings.
Angry and racist responses to the crowning of Nina Davuluri, a 24-year-old Indian-American from New York, seem to follow the pattern identified by the study conducted by researchers at China’s Beihang University.
The study found anger to be the most influential emotion on social media.
Anju Kaduvettoor Davidson, assistant director of the UF Center for the Study of Race and Race Relations, said the Twitter responses to the Miss America pageant results stem from ignorance.
“There’s some racism related to 9/11 or terrorism, and people are uneducated about where people are from,” said Davidson, an Indian-American. “I think people end up using that information to generalize, and they take out some of the anger about other things and apply it here.”
According to study results published in an MIT Technology Review on Monday, the research team focused on the way messages labeled with certain emotions influenced people on the same network.
The study observed Weibo, a Chinese social media platform similar to Twitter, to gather its data.
The researchers concluded that angry messages were more likely to be reposted up to three degrees from the original user — this included angry responses to the original message.
A few factors might attribute to this behavior, said Andrew Selepak, director of UF’s online master’s program specialization in social media.
“The first is the anonymous aspect of social media,” he said. “People think they have the ability to say anything, and they can hide behind a username and believe that no one can find them in real life.”
Carlos Soria, a 32-year-old UF mass communication graduate student, agreed social media makes it easier to share angry emotions.
“The power of social media has given users a mask to spew hatred online, and it continues to have a major impact on the way we anonymously communicate,” he said.
Davidson said she wonders if the people tweeting angry remarks would act differently if they didn’t have a cyber mask to hide behind.
“People feel they have more of an outlet to be heard on something like social media,” she said. “It’s semi-anonymous, but would these people say it outside of this cyber world? If she was in the room would they still say it?”
A version of this story ran on page 5 on 9/18/2013 under the headline "Angry, racist tweets follow the Miss America crowning"
