The October 2017 Las Vegas shooting was the deadliest shooting in modern American history, but little scholarship has examined the public uproar in its wake, particularly in digital networks. Drawing on a corpus of 100,000 public Tweets and 1,119,638 unique words written in reaction to the shooting, this article addresses this lacuna by investigating the topics of reactions and their linkages with elites. This article theorizes that elites invigorate the emotionality of public reactions and broker the connection between discursive and affective content in digital networks. The results show that Tweets engaging with elites expressed statistically greater emotionality and extremity in emotional valences compared to Tweets written independent of elites. Additionally, this article identifies variations in the discursive themes invoked based on the types of elites. Mentions of non-political elites drew on themes about expressive support and depictions of the immediate environment with little emotional extremity. By contrast, mentions of political elites drew on themes about broader policy debates on gun ownership laws and adherent policy reforms. Unlike with non-political elites, mentions of political elites also exhibited greater extremity in negative emotional valences, reflective of increasing polarization in American politics.

中文翻译：

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精英如何在数字网络中激发情感和极端

2017 年 10 月的拉斯维加斯枪击事件是美国现代历史上最致命的枪击事件，但很少有学术研究审视其引发的公众骚动，尤其是在数字网络领域。本文利用 100,000 条公共推文和 1,119,638 个针对枪击事件的独特文字的语料库，通过调查反应主题及其与精英的联系来解决这一缺陷。本文的理论认为，精英激发了公众反应的情绪，并调解了数字网络中话语内容和情感内容之间的联系。结果表明，与独立于精英的推文相比，与精英互动的推文在统计上表现出更高的情感性和极端的情绪效价。此外，本文还根据精英类型确定了所引用的话语主题的变化。对非政治精英的提及采用了表达支持和对周围环境的描述等主题，几乎没有情绪极端。相比之下，对政治精英的提及则涉及有关枪支所有权法和坚持政策改革的更广泛政策辩论的主题。与非政治精英不同，提及政治精英也表现出更大的负面情绪效价，这反映了美国政治日益两极分化。