Social Media Engagement With Strategy- and Issue-Framed Political News

Issue and strategy frames, oft-used ways of conveying political news, affect people’s political beliefs and attitudes, with strategic news frames producing greater cynicism and distrust than issue frames. Although some past research suggests that audiences prefer strategically framed news, it is not clear whether the public gravitates toward issue or strategy frames on social media. We partnered with a national news organization to conduct 48 tests of whether people more frequently clicked on, commented on, or reacted to strategy- or issue-based news. On Facebook, people were randomly shown different versions of posts about a news article, resulting in 967,260 impressions. Using meta-analytic techniques, we found significant heterogeneity across the tests. Overall, however, strategy-based news yielded more clicks, whereas issue-based news yielded more comments and reactions. The results were not moderated by whether the test mentioned a salient issue or the number of days until the election.