Emotional communication, especially through social media platforms, has become a contemporary populist threat. While this phenomenon has been studied in for example news media and social movements, we know less about its influence on civil society organizations, despite their pluralism being a centerpiece in a vibrant democracy. More specifically, we do not know if social media make civil society organizations more isomorphic and thus decreasing the diversity of their emotional communication over time. This question is relevant given the broad range of organizational fields that civil society engages in, as well as the documented push toward especially extreme positivity on social media platforms. Given this background, the article explores the use of positive and negative sentiment, as well as of sentiment intensity, over time in the social media communication of different organizational fields of civil society. We employ sentiment analysis to analyze approximately 100,000 organizational posts on Facebook from 125 Swedish nonprofit organizations during 2015–2020. We find that the pluralism of civil society organizations across different fields, as regards emotional communication, is retained over time, thus not threatening the pluralism of civil society in this way. In addition, emotional communication, and especially positivity, increases over time in all fields in absolute terms. However, considering post length, the relative amount of emotional communication exhibits less of an increase. Rather, across all fields there is an unexpected isomorphism relating to posts becoming longer, while enticing less user engagement. This development, rather than the lack of pluralism, raises democratic concerns.

中文翻译：

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花样年华：民间社会组织在社交媒体上的情感交流的纵向研究

情感交流，尤其是通过社交媒体平台进行的情感交流，已成为当代民粹主义的威胁。虽然新闻媒体和社会运动等已经研究了这种现象，但我们对其对公民社会组织的影响知之甚少，尽管它们的多元化是充满活力的民主的核心。更具体地说，我们不知道社交媒体是否使公民社会组织更加同构，从而随着时间的推移降低了他们情感交流的多样性。鉴于公民社会参与的组织领域广泛，以及社交媒体平台上对特别极端积极性的推动，这个问题是相关的。在此背景下，本文探讨了积极和消极情绪以及情绪强度在公民社会不同组织领域的社交媒体传播中随时间推移的使用。我们采用情感分析来分析来自 2015 年至 2020 年期间 125 个瑞典非营利组织在 Facebook 上的大约 100,000 个组织帖子。我们发现，不同领域的公民社会组织在情感交流方面的多元化随着时间的推移而保持，因此不会以这种方式威胁公民社会的多元化。此外，情感交流，尤其是积极性，随着时间的推移，在所有领域的绝对值都会增加。然而，考虑到帖子长度，情感交流的相对数量表现出较少的增长。相反，在所有领域中，都存在一种意想不到的同构性，即帖子变得更长，同时吸引更少的用户参与度。这种发展，而不是缺乏多元化，引发了对民主的担忧。