Abstract
Facebook added emoji reactions, including Angry, in February 2016, and for a time weighted them more heavily than likes in ranking posts. Did audiences of European parties become angrier? I use 526,813 posts from the pages of 112 parties and 74 party leaders in 20 European countries from March 2016 to September 2020, collected through CrowdTangle. Angry reactions rose from 3.7% of all reactions in 2016 to 7.9% in 2020. But all emoji reactions rose at the same pace, from 11% to 22% of reactions, as users replaced likes with emoji. As a share of emoji reactions, anger rose only modestly when pooled, because the angriest pages grew, and on the typical page it fell. Anger was concentrated by position rather than by time. Within the same country and month, pages of populist radical-right parties drew 3.1 points more anger as a share of all reactions than mainstream parties, and parties in government 2.2 points less. When a party entered government, the anger on its page fell. Anger was lower in the 30 days before national elections. Posts with more anger, holding total reactions constant, drew more shares: ten points more anger went with about 17% more shares, while love and laughter went with no more. The rise of anger on party pages was mostly a rise in emoji use. What anger there was belonged above all to opposition parties and to challengers of left and right, and it went with wider sharing.
Cite
Hotham, T. (2026). Angrier, or Just More Expressive? Facebook Reactions to European Parties and Leaders, 2016 to 2020. Preprint, Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23396858