Short answer
No. Small parties looked larger on Facebook than at the ballot box, but engagement shares did not anticipate who would gain votes: the Greens' share of interactions fell just as their vote rose.
What the evidence shows
- The study uses 38,729 posts from eight Finnish party pages, January 2010 to September 2020.
- From June 2015, the Centre Party, the National Coalition and the Social Democrats together drew 44% of interactions against 67% of the vote among the seven continuing parties.
- The Left Alliance drew 26%, 2.6 times its vote share, and the Christian Democrats 2.5 times theirs, mainly by posting far more.
- Movement Now drew 11% of interactions in the month before the 2019 election, when it won 2.3% of the vote.
- The Greens' share of interactions fell from about a third in the second half of 2015 to under a tenth in 2019, while their vote rose from 8.5% to 11.5%, and to 16.0% at the European election.
Caveats
The Finns Party, the main challenger, is not in the data, so all shares are among the parties that are.