‘Anger’ topped ‘love’ when Facebook users reacted to lawmakers’ posts after 2016 election
The U.S. congressional Facebook audience used the “angry” button in response to lawmakers’ posts nearly 14 million times following the 2016 election.
Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
Adam Hughes is associate director of Data Labs at Pew Research Center. He is an applied computational social scientist focused on communication, behavior and public opinion. His research also evaluates the promise and pitfalls of emerging methodological approaches. He has coauthored research that uses computer vision to understand gender in online images; work that applies natural language processing to measure partisan conflict and information sharing among elected officials; and work that combines survey and social media data to better understand behavior online.
Hughes received his Ph.D. in government from the University of Virginia, where he used natural language processing, survey experiments and television broadcast data to measure how political communication shapes voting behavior and attitudes. His academic work appears in journals such as Political Science Research and Methods, Public Administration Review, and The Journal of Political Marketing. He regularly presents research at academic conferences and has discussed his work with media outlets including CNN, The Washington Post, and Wired.
