• Information Systems Review
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.163-184
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• 2020

The information on SNS, which is created by the forms of postings and comments, is being magnified and redistributed to news media expanding its impacts on real words. This amplifying effects of SNS comments have been increasingly discussed but there still lacks the answers for which dimensions of information is magnified, and what affects the direction and the degree of the amplification. This study, therefore, explores the detailed dimensions that are magnified by SNS comments and how SNS posting structure and social network characteristics affect them by using sentiment analysis. By analyzing 2,378 Facebook postings and news articles and their 26,312 SNS and 74,730 news site comments, this study shows that SNS comments magnify the sentiments of the posting articles they are attached to. In comparison to news site comments, SNS comments magnify the cognitive and social dimensions more than the news site comments. In the affective dimension, they tend to magnify only the positive emotion more than news site comments. Also, the findings reveal that whether the article in the posting is written by the posting owner affects the degree of amplification when the comments are remained positive or switched positive, while the opposite determines the amplification when comments remain negatively, suggesting that the user relationship in social network is the important factor that affects the direction and the degree of the information amplification in SNS.