The platform prism: affordance attributions for affective group polarization in China’s public discourse

Digital platform architectures condition affective group polarization in public discourse. Drawing on affordance theory, this article presents a comparative sentiment analysis of user comments across two Chinese media platforms, Weibo and Toutiao, to explore how platforms structurally mediate emotional expressions. The empirical comparison demonstrates that the social, algorithmic, and regulatory affordances of the platforms interact with users’ imagined affordances to scale individual negativity bias into affective group polarization, generating a differentiated content environment. This dynamic is conceptualized as an affordance-mediated prism refraction effect, theorizing how socio-technical infrastructure redirects public sentiment trajectories. To mitigate such emotional escalation, it is imperative to reassert platforms’ gatekeeping responsibilities through upgrading technological architectures, establishing algorithmic transparency systems, and constructing effective penalization frameworks.