arXiv cs.CY· Nouar Aldahoul, Hazem Ibrahim, Majd Mahmutoglu, Hajra Tarar, Muhammad Fareed Zaffar, Talal Rahwan, Yasir Zaki·· 13 小时前AI 评分29
十年跨三国研究：Facebook 不幸新闻评论中 26% 属幸灾乐祸
Schadenfreude in the Digital Public Sphere: A Cross-National, Decade-Long Analysis of Facebook News Engagement
AI 导读
一项分析 Facebook 十年（2015-2024）不幸新闻互动的研究发现，幸灾乐祸占相关评论的 26%，比同帖“Haha”表情反应所暗示的比例高出三分之一。
正文 · 原文
Abstract:Pleasure at the misfortune of others, or schadenfreude, is widely believed to have become a routine feature of online news audiences, yet its prevalence and social patterning have rarely been measured at scale. Here, we examine ten years (2015-2024) of Facebook engagement with misfortune news across nine major outlets spanning the political spectrum in the United States, the United Kingdom, and India. We separate schadenfreude, in which a commenter expresses pleasure at the misfortune, from hostility without pleasure, using an ensemble of three open-weight language models validated against human annotation, and classify 1.06 million post-comment pairs. We find that schadenfreude constitutes 26% of comments on news covering misfortune, a third more than the rate implied by "Haha" reactions on the same posts, and that the two measures agree at the post level (Spearman $\rho = 0.43$) while hostility does not ($\rho = 0.07$). Schadenfreude varies by less than one percentage point across the three countries and concentrates where theories of deserved suffering predict: on misfortunes framed as self-inflicted, on scandals and defeats rather than deaths, and on public figures rather than ordinary people. Hostility, in contrast, varies widely across outlets and responds to politics. Audiences of a left-leaning US outlet became 5.5 percentage points less hostile while their party held the presidency, a pattern robust across specifications, whereas no comparable power effect on schadenfreude survives robustness checks. Cross-national differences that a toxicity-based measure attributes to schadenfreude turn out, under the pleasure-explicit measure, to be differences in hostility. These results show that schadenfreude is a measurable mode of news engagement, distinct from toxicity and patterned by the moral structure of misfortune rather than by country or political power.
| Comments: | 12 pages, 7 figures, 6 tables |
| Subjects: | Social and Information Networks (cs.SI); Computers and Society (cs.CY) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2601.20413 [cs.SI] |
| (or arXiv:2601.20413v3 [cs.SI] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2601.20413 arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite |
Submission history
From: Hazem Ibrahim [view email]
[v1]
Wed, 28 Jan 2026 09:18:45 UTC (6,704 KB)
[v2]
Wed, 18 Mar 2026 19:31:19 UTC (6,584 KB)
[v3]
Wed, 21 Oct 2026 10:39:30 UTC (56 KB)
来源：arXiv cs.CY · arxiv.org