When falsehood wins? Varied effects of sensational elements on users’ engagement with real and fake posts

Based on a quantitative content analysis of microblogs on COVID-19 that is linked to the actual Weibo user engagement (comments, reposts, and likes) they received, this study investigates the role of generic/formal frames, emotional appeals, and visual elements in people's varied levels of engagement with fake and real posts. Results revealed that relative to real posts, fake posts tended to focus more on COVID incidents that happened outside of China, utilize more episodic and human-interest frames, rely more on anger and disgust emotions, and feature more pictures. More importantly, although fake posts initially received fewer user responses than real posts, they earned significantly more reactions through employing sensational elements such as anger, conflict, and morality in their content. Most of these post-level characteristics, however, exerted minimal impact on real microblogs. Consequently, as the emotionally charged and sensationally framed fake posts drive more users to comment on and repost them, fake news may diffuse faster than real news and reach a larger audience.