Pre-print version of paper accepted for publication in Journalism Practice 1 Diversifying Likes - Relating Reactions to Commenting and Sharing on Newspaper Facebook Pages Anders Olof Larsson Faculty of Management Westerdals Oslo School of Arts, Communication & Technology anders.larsson@westerdals.no andersoloflarsson.se @a_larsson Abstract News sharing and commenting is arguably one of the most interesting aspects of how news are consumed and interacted with online. Finding answers to questions regarding who engages in these ways, what type of content gets engaged with and why certain items are shared and commented upon but not others are of the utmost importance for those who want to navigate the complex echo system of online news flows. The paper at hand addresses the latter two of the three posed questions – what gets shared or commented, and why – in the context of the social networking site Facebook. Detailing the influences of Reactions, an expansion of the ‘Like’ button launched during the spring of 2016, the presented analyses find that Reactions such as Love, Haha, Wow, Sad and Angry emerge as somewhat unpopular in relation to the original Like functionality. Moreover, while more positive forms Reactions appear to have a hampering effect on the willingness of news consumers on Facebook to engage by means of sharing and commenting, more negative varieties of Facebook Reactions appear to yield adverse influences. Introduction Connecting the communication practices of the Roman empire with the fast-paced digital environment of today, Primo and Zago (2014) suggest that “since the Roman official notes carved on stone to the latest news tweets posted live from an event through a smartphone, news production and circulation have developed side by side with communication” (2014, 40). Undoubtedly, a series of technological innovations have contributed to shaping the journalistic profession as we know it today – besides the stone tablets mentioned above, more recent examples include the telegraph, that was employed for long-distances diffusion of news in the mid 18 th century (e.g. Heinrich 2010, Winston 1998), and indeed the telephone, an invention that not only created the very basis of telecommunications, but that also impacted the ways in which journalists seek out and gather information (e.g. Pavlik 2000). Even more recent technological novelties include broadcast journalism – first through radio, later by means of television. Of course, a brief history of the tie-ins between technological innovations and the profession of journalism would be woefully incomplete without mentioning the use of computers for journalistic purposes. While such use was supposedly introduced already in 1952 (as shown by Cox 2000), it arguably gained traction in the 1980s – a development that was further strengthened by the launch and continued expansion of the Internet, starting in the mid-1990s (e.g. Pavlik 2001). Although it is important to remember that supposedly technologically-induced changes always depend on the socio-material settings in which they occur (e.g. Boczkowski 2005a, Karlsson and Clerwall 2012, 2013), the claim made by Barnard (2014) that “technology is a key factor in the radical changes