Do populist parties do better on Facebook?
Yes, in most of Europe. In my study of 669,760 posts from 112 official party pages in 17 European countries between 2010 and 2020, a typical post by a populist party received about 2.5 times as many likes, comments, shares and reactions as a post by another party of the same size and government status.
What is a satellite campaign?
A satellite campaign is an organisation that campaigns for a party without being part of it. The best-known British example is Momentum, formed to support Jeremy Corbyn's leadership of the Labour Party. On Facebook in 2017 it did a different job from Labour's own pages: instead of asking for votes, it asked people to campaign.
On Facebook, do party leaders or party pages matter more?
They do different jobs, and how much of a party's audience the leader carries varies hugely. In British general elections the party page was the campaign machine and the leader's page was the personal voice. Across 2010 to 2020, some leaders drew most of their party's Facebook engagement and others drew a quarter or less.
Can Facebook engagement predict elections?
Not well. In my work on Britain, Scandinavia and the United States, Facebook engagement tracked how a party was doing at the time, but it was badly calibrated across parties and gave little or no advance warning of changes in support.
How did British parties use targeted Facebook ads at the 2019 general election?
Mostly by repeating a small number of messages many times. The Conservatives started 9,137 ads using only 452 distinct texts; one text accounted for 2,479 ads and five texts for 63% of all their ads. Labour spent the most on Facebook and Instagram.
Did Leave win the EU referendum on Facebook by being more negative?
Leave did win the engagement battle, but the evidence does not support the claim that it did so by being more negative. Pages aligned with Leave produced 65% of the engagement from 23% of the posts, yet among campaigns, leaders and parties, Remain posts were, if anything, slightly more often negative.
Does Facebook reward the political right?
Not simply. In matched 2020 US Senate races, Republican posts drew more engagement each, but Democrats posted about twice as often, so totals did not clearly differ. In Europe the biggest Facebook premium went to populists, and the very largest to the populist radical left.
What is Janus-faced campaigning?
Janus-faced campaigning is a term from my PhD: a party using different pages with different approaches to reach different audiences, so presenting different faces of the same party to the public. In Britain the two main parties ran a traditional Facebook campaign through their official pages alongside a subsidiary 'new methods' campaign through satellite pages such as Momentum.