2025/11/24 by Dongdong Yang, David Atkin, Yuren Qin · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Computer Science · Psychology · #Digital Communication and Language #Language, Metaphor, and Cognition #Linguistics, Language Diversity, and Identity
paper · doi:10.1080/1369118x.2025.2588355
openalex publication_date 2025/11/24 · openalex created_date 2025/11/25 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/15
Emojis enjoy global popularity on social media and can be used either as an avoidance strategy or a coded language for opinion expression, depending on user personality and political climate. Drawing from spiral of silence theory, the current study employed online surveys to connect personality traits to four types of political emoji use (i.e., emotional, identity, indirect, and polite expression) in Chinese and American contexts. Results demonstrate that neurotic individuals perceived higher hostility, which reduced emoji use for identity expression. By contrast, extroversion and conscientiousness decreased perceived intimidation in social media political discussion, which in turn increased emoji use for all four types of expression. Moreover, both perceived hostility and intimidation significantly increased Weibo users’ emoji use for indirect expression, but significant cross-cultural differences only existed in the former relationship, with Chinese Weibo users using more emojis for indirect expression than their American X counterparts. Implications for how social media platforms might refine moderation policies—to combat hostility while helping break the spiral of silence—are discussed.