{"ID":5937656,"CreatedAt":"2026-07-07T03:14:33.014478982Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-07-08T10:16:13.965239979Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04220","arxiv_id":"2607.04220","title":"The Politics Attention Makes: Platform Media Logic and the Mediatization of Politics","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.","short_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 actor...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04220","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.04220v1","authors":"[\"Petter Törnberg\"]","published":"2026-07-05T10:24:42Z","proceeding":"cs.SI","tasks":"[\"cs.SI\"]","methods":"[\"LoRA\"]","has_code":false}