# Negative news posts are less prevalent and generate lower user engagement than non-negative news posts across six countries

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.19300 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.19300/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 6 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [Optuna: A Next-generation Hyperparameter Optimization Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10902/) (2019)
- [HuggingFace's Transformers: State-of-the-art Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03771/) (2019)
- [Human language reveals a universal positivity bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.3855/) (2014)
- [Measuring Emotional Contagion in Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.06021/) (2015)
- [Computation and application of generalized linear mixed model derivatives using lme4](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10414/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Although news negativity is often studied, missing is comparative evidence on the prevalence of and engagement with negative political and non-political news posts on social media. We use 6,081,134 Facebook posts published between January 1, 2020, and April 1, 2024, by 97 media organizations in six countries (U.S., UK, Ireland, Poland, France, Spain) and develop two multilingual classifiers for labeling posts as (non-)political and (non-)negative. We show that: (1) negative news posts constitute a relatively small fraction (12.6%); (2) political news posts are neither more nor less negative than non-political news posts; (3) U.S. political news posts are less negative relative to the other countries on average (40% lower odds); (4) Negative news posts get 15% fewer likes and 13% fewer comments than non-negative news posts. Lastly, (5) we provide estimates of the proportion of the total volume of user engagement with negative news posts and show that only between 10.2% to 13.1% of engagement is linked to negative posts by the analyzed news organizations.