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arXiv · 2607.04220

The Politics Attention Makes: Platform Media Logic and the Mediatization of Politics

Petter Törnberg
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Abstract

Empirical research on social media and politics has primarily treated platforms as distributive systems that expose users to particular messages. The mediatization literature, however, suggests shifting attention upstream: from circulation to production. Under intense competition for platform attention, political actors who depend on visibility face pressure to learn from recurrent differences in reach and engagement - shaping politics around platform media logic. This paper examines that production-side dimension of platforms political impact by introducing attention price analysis: an exploratory method for estimating the differentiated attention returns associated with forms of expression. Using RoBERTa reward models trained on residualized engagement across X/Twitter, Bluesky, and Mastodon, the analysis compares how platform environments reward rhetorical, emotional, epistemic, and relational features of public communication. The attention signal differs sharply across platforms and engagement actions. X/Twitter sharing rewards antagonism while penalizing respect and nuance; Bluesky reposting favors neutral, lower-emotion language; and Mastodon boosts reward reasoning, nuance, compassion, and collective expression. Toxicity is rewarded across platforms, but in bounded and nonlinear ways. The findings suggest that moving from X/Twitter to less engagement-optimized alternatives such as Bluesky and Mastodon does not eliminate attention pressures, but it may reward less antagonistic and more deliberative forms of politics. The paper contributes a production-side approach to social media and politics by making one dimension of platform media logic empirically visible.

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Petter Törnberg. 2026-07-05. The Politics Attention Makes: Platform Media Logic and the Mediatization of Politics. https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04220

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