Facebook news captions as outsourced emotions: A computational analysis of subjective language of newspapers on Facebook

With the rising popularity of social media as news sources a new common format element for presenting news has emerged: in addition to the classic headline, lead and picture, social media users can add a caption containing their own message about the news article. We argue that news media use these captions to bridge the gap between objective reporting and the more interpersonal and subjective logic of social media. To investigate this we used computational text analysis to measure whether captions from newspapers on Facebook contain more subjective and positive language compared to headlines and leads. Our analysis, covering nine newspapers from the Netherlands and Flanders over a period of 2.5 years, confirms that captions are more subjective and more positive. We conclude that newspapers use captions to outsource emotion to the social media format, and call for research into how this takes shape and affects the audience.status: publishe