Emotional Resonance and Multimedia Presence: Unpacking Virality and Misinformation Risks in the Generative AI Era

Social media platforms shape political discourse, yet their emotional and multimedia affordances also create fertile ground for misinformation. This study examines how emotional resonance and multimedia cues drive engagement and within-platform virality in Reddit’s largest political communities, offering implications for theory and governance in the Generative AI era. Using 17,548 posts and 1.5 million comments, we apply deep learning models (BERT, DistilRoBERTa) to capture fine-grained affective expressions. Results show that negative emotions—especially anger, disgust, and fear—are strongly associated with engagement and within-platform virality, while positive emotions have weaker effects. Multimedia presence significantly increases emotional intensity and reach, highlighting the importance of peripheral multimedia cues in emotional engagement and amplification. Additional associations involving moderator status and account-level authentication characteristics suggest that governance-related features may also be linked to lower emotional amplification. These findings clarify organic amplification dynamics that become especially consequential in contemporary social media environments.