In 2017, Facebook’s news feed algorithm began weighting emoji reactions (e.g., love and angry) as five times more valuable than the like button. Such a change is theoretically intriguing because existing research largely suggests that women tend to use emojis more than men on social media. Within the context of political campaigns, prior work has revealed a host of other “gender gaps,” from documenting men’s and women’s differing tolerance for negative campaigns, to examining variations in online political participation and—more broadly—charting gendered imbalances in party demographic support. To date, however, no study has looked to investigate this potential gender emoji gap within the online political environment. This paper explores just such a gap, combining data across three US election cycles (2016–2020), over thirty million individual observations, and thousands of (federal and state) candidates. The data shows that women exhibited a greater preference for emoji reactions than men in response to posts from the 2016 presidential election candidates. Party, and candidate negativity, also appeared to moderate this effect. Likely due to this (moderated) gender gap, Democratic candidates continued to see a much higher proportion of emoji reactions to their posts, than Republicans in 2018, and 2020. In turn, the results offer clear evidence of a persistent emoji gender gap in US political campaigns on Facebook. Such findings strengthen our theoretical understanding of political communication and behavior online, and prompt important questions going forward for future research.

中文翻译：

---

喜欢与爱（以及其他表情符号反应）：Facebook、女性和美国竞选活动中的性别表情符号差距

2017 年，Facebook 的新闻推送算法开始对表情符号反应（例如爱和愤怒）进行加权，其价值比点赞按钮高出五倍。这种变化在理论上很有趣，因为现有研究很大程度上表明，女性在社交媒体上比男性更倾向于使用表情符号。在政治运动的背景下，之前的工作揭示了许多其他“性别差距”，从记录男性和女性对负面运动的不同容忍度，到检查在线政治参与的变化，以及更广泛地绘制政党人口支持中的性别失衡。然而，迄今为止，还没有研究调查在线政治环境中这种潜在的性别表情符号差距。本文结合了美国三个选举周期（2016-2020）的数据、超过三千万个人观察结果以及数千名（联邦和州）候选人，探讨了这样一个差距。数据显示，在回应 2016 年总统选举候选人的帖子时，女性比男性更倾向于使用表情符号。政党和候选人的消极情绪似乎也减轻了这种影响。可能是由于这种（适度的）性别差距，2018 年和 2020 年，民主党候选人在其帖子中看到表情符号反应的比例仍然远高于共和党候选人。反过来，结果提供了美国持续存在表情符号性别差距的明确证据Facebook 上的政治活动。这些发现加强了我们对在线政治传播和行为的理论理解，并提出了未来研究的重要问题。