When Attention Hurts: How Multimodal Sensational Frames Drive Both Engagement and Victim-Blaming in News on Gender-Based Violence

This study examines how sensational strategies independently and interactively shape public attitudes. We conceptualize the sensational victim frame as a theoretical domain comprising two dimensions—victimization and objectifying—each manifested in textual and visual forms. The analysis is based on a dataset of 16,908 gender-based violence news posts and 279,652 associated comments from Weibo (2020–2024). Textual victimization and visual objectifying significantly increase user engagement. Moreover, these two strategies independently heighten the likelihood of victim-blaming comments, and their cross-modal combinations further amplify this effect. Overall, the findings demonstrate that sensationalism in gender-based violence reporting operates through distinct textual and visual pathways that can both attract and harm audiences. This study advances multimodal framing theory and offers practical implications for ethical reporting and platform design aimed at mitigating revictimization while sustaining public attention.