Studying Emotional and Trust-building Effects of Symbolic Communication on YouTube

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Original abstract

This study examines how symbolic communication shapes user engagement, emotional expression, and trust in digital political discourse related to election denialism debunking during Taiwan’s 2024 presidential election. Using a multimodal dataset of 1,973 YouTube videos and over 342,000 comments collected via the YouTube API, we analyze social, cultural, and political (SCP) symbols embedded in video key frames. Large language models were employed (after validation) to detect symbolic content and assess emotional intensity and expressions of institutional trust in comments. Statistical analyses reveal that videos containing SCP symbols generate significantly higher engagement than non-symbolic content. Cultural symbols, in particular, elicit the strongest emotional responses and the highest levels of expressed trust in the democratic system. These findings highlight the influential role of symbolic cues in shaping online political conversations and contribute to information systems research by linking multimodal symbolic meaning to user behavior in algorithmically mediated environments.

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