Abstract
Satellite campaigns, organisations that campaign for a party without being part of it, are now a familiar part of British elections. We know less about what they do between elections. I compare the Facebook page of Momentum, the campaign group formed to support Jeremy Corbyn's leadership of the Labour Party, in the month before the 2017 general election (153 posts) with a random sample of its posts from 2018 (120 posts). All posts were hand coded with the scheme used in my doctoral thesis. During the 2017 campaign, as I show in a companion paper (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23296712), Momentum's page mainly asked its followers to campaign. In 2018 that changed. Requests to help on the doorstep, volunteer or sign up fell from about half of posts to 6% to 8%. The page became more negative (posts mainly negative in tone rose from 28% to 55%) and turned its criticism to the media and to opposition MPs: criticism of mainstream media rose from 14% to 38% of posts, of newspapers from 1% to 20% and of opposition MPs from 5% to 22%. It praised party members more, asked people to join the party more often (2% to 16%), and used less humour and fewer memes. Between elections, Momentum's page moved from organising campaigners to arguing about politics and the media on behalf of its side.Provenance and AI use. The data were collected with Netvizz for my doctoral research, before Netvizz closed in 2019. This paper builds on my doctoral thesis (Hotham 2021, University of Bath). An earlier version was presented at the Political Studies Association conference in 2021 ("Permanent satellite campaigning? Momentum across the 2017 General Election and 2018 permanent campaign"), and the analysis develops Chapter 7 of the thesis. 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). From the Doorstep to the Debate: Momentum's Facebook Page in the 2017 General Election and the 2018 Permanent Campaign. Preprint, Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23279941