<![CDATA[This study investigates how emotional intensity, rather than sentiment direction, shapes engagement and algorithmic visibility in digital political discourse. Using sentiment analysis, a dataset of about 15,000 posts from Twitter (X) and YouTube was collected over a 30-day period and scored with a hybrid TextBlob, VADER, and BERT pipeline. Emotional strength (the absolute sentiment value) correlated moderately with engagement (r = 0.58, p < 0.05), whereas the directional sentiment score did not (r ≈ 0.05). Emotionally intense posts attracted about 2.4 times more engagement than neutral posts, and positive posts were the most frequent (41%) while neutral posts drew the lowest mean engagement. These results indicate that engagement-based ranking amplifies emotional magnitude over neutral or analytical content, which can narrow the diversity of visible expression. The findings give platform designers and policymakers a reproducible basis for assessing how affective dynamics shape visibility in algorithmically mediated public discourse.]]>
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