Abstract
Engagement on politicians' Facebook pages is often read as a sign of public interest. I ask how closely it tracks two free measures of public attention, Wikipedia pageviews and Google searches, and whether it moves before or after them. I use 93,567 posts from 32 British pages (13 parties, 18 current or former leaders and Momentum) between July 2015 and October 2020, which drew 245 million interactions, matched to 126 million views of the corresponding English Wikipedia articles and to weekly Google Trends indices for 21 of the actors. Within each actor, Facebook engagement and the two attention measures rose and fell together, but loosely: the average correlation of detrended daily Facebook and Wikipedia series was 0.12, rising to 0.25 for weekly series, while Wikipedia and Google moved together far more closely (0.83). On timing, the strongest link was on the same day or in the same week. Wikipedia stayed raised for a few days after Facebook spikes, and Facebook usually peaked on the same day as a Wikipedia spike or within a day of it, with no clear tendency to come first. Panel Granger tests with actor and date fixed effects find small predictive links in both directions at the daily scale; at the weekly scale, rises in Facebook engagement went with somewhat higher Wikipedia and Google attention in the following weeks, but the summed effects are modest and sensitive to the sample. At the 2017 and 2019 general elections and the 2019 European Parliament election, shares of Facebook engagement and of Wikipedia views missed the parties' vote shares by similar margins (mean absolute errors of 8.0 and 7.4 points), Google search shares did worse (11.2), and all three were far less accurate than the final polls (1.1) or the previous result (4.1). Facebook engagement behaves like one more measure of attention: it moves with public interest rather than reliably ahead of it, and it is not a measure of support.
Cite
Hotham, T. (2026). Does Facebook Lead Public Attention or Follow It? Facebook Engagement, Wikipedia Pageviews and Google Searches for British Parties and Leaders, 2015 to 2020. Preprint, Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23399784