Short answer
Yes. European Parliament campaigns on Facebook were real but second-order, for parties and even more for their audiences.
What the evidence shows
- The study compares 151 party-elections in the 2014 and 2019 European Parliament elections (96 pages, 15 countries) with party pages before national parliamentary elections in the same countries.
- In national campaigns, parties posted about 84% more in the final four weeks than in the weeks before and received more than three times the interactions. In European campaigns they posted about 54% more and received about twice the interactions.
- The median post drew about 40% more than before the campaign in national campaigns, but about 8% more in European ones, a rise that could not be distinguished from zero.
- Eurosceptic and populist parties showed no detectably larger surge, though these estimates are imprecise.
Caveats
The comparison is descriptive and rests on the pages and elections available in the data.