Ideological discrepancy between publishers and news content is linked with audience engagement and consensus on Facebook

A team of researchers from Brazilian universities analyzed Facebook posts linking to political news during a Brazilian presidential election, examining five dimensions of engagement: ideological discrepancy between publishers and content, emotional responses, audience consensus, toxicity, and content topics. Their study, published on arXiv, reveals that ideological mismatch between publishers and the news they share is nonlinearly linked to engagement—consensus drops under conditions of very high ideological discrepancy, but also under very high alignment (echo chambers). Toxicity increases primarily under extreme mismatch, suggesting hostile discourse thrives when publishers post content far from their ideological lean.

Among highly partisan publishers, the researchers observed a striking pattern: higher toxicity in posts correlates with increased audience consensus, indicating that hostile language may actually reinforce in-group agreement in strongly ideological contexts. A statistical model showed that emotional valence, toxicity, and ideological discrepancy are the strongest predictors of consensus. These findings highlight how the interplay of ideological distance, emotional reactions, and toxicity drives polarization and consensus on social media platforms like Facebook.