Abstract
When a crisis strikes, does political attention turn from parties to government? I test this on Facebook in Britain using 274,047 posts from 437 political pages tracked by CrowdTangle between June 2018 and October 2020: government and Parliament pages, party pages and politicians' pages. Before the pandemic, government pages drew 5% of the interactions on government, party and politicians' pages combined. In the first wave of Covid-19, from mid-March to the end of May 2020, they drew 29%. Weekly interactions with government pages rose about twelvefold, from a threefold rise in posting and a three- to fourfold rise in engagement per post. Engagement with party pages showed no clear jump, and the typical party or politician's post drew less engagement than before. The attention faded at about 5% a week. The tone changed too, but not as one might expect. The government's main Facebook page was normally a target of mockery and anger: in 2018 and 2019, laughing and angry reactions were more common on it than love. During the "stay home" weeks both almost disappeared. They returned from the week of 11 May 2020, when the government's advice changed to "stay alert", before the Dominic Cummings story. By the summer laughter was back near its usual level, though anger stayed below its 2018–19 level. On Facebook the rally round the government showed up as a surge of attention to the state and a two-month pause in the usual mockery of it.Provenance and AI use. The data were exported from CrowdTangle in October 2020 for my doctoral research. This paper builds on my doctoral thesis (Hotham 2021, University of Bath). The analysis and writing were completed in 2026. The analysis code and drafts of the text were prepared with the assistance of an AI system (Claude, by Anthropic), which was also used to review drafts. I checked the analysis and the text and take responsibility for both. Version 2 added this statement to the paper, and version 3 changes only the date on the title page; the findings are unchanged.
Cite
Hotham, T. (2026). A Pause in the Mockery: Government, Party and Politician Pages on Facebook in Britain's First Covid-19 Wave. Preprint, Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23297886