Abstract
Surveys found that trust in governments rose across Europe when the first Covid-19 lockdowns began. I ask whether attention on Facebook moved in the same direction: towards the pages of governing parties and heads of government and away from the opposition. I use 81,372 posts from 147 party and leader pages in 15 European countries, compared week by week with the same country's opposition pages around the date when each country's lockdown stringency first reached 70 on the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker. Interactions with governing pages roughly doubled in the first eight weeks, but interactions with opposition pages also rose by about 60%. Relative to the opposition, governing pages gained by a factor of 1.34 (95% CI 0.86 to 2.08) with each page weighted equally and 1.44 (1.05 to 1.96) when weighted by interactions. The gain began in the two weeks before lockdown, was concentrated on heads of government's own pages, and had gone by the summer. Weighted by interactions, it shrank by about 3% a week. Within countries, the relative gain tracked the recent death toll more closely than lockdown stringency, but between countries neither stringency nor deaths predicted its size. Laughing and angry reactions became rarer on heads of government's pages, and love and care 1 more common, though laughter fell on opposition leaders' pages too. The rally on European political Facebook was real but modest, short and hard to separate from the noise of ordinary political weeks.
Cite
Hotham, T. (2026). A Smaller Rally: Governing and Opposition Pages on Facebook in Europe's First Covid-19 Wave. Preprint, Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23396940