Short answer
A little, and briefly. In Britain government pages' share of attention jumped from 5% to 29% in the first wave, and across Europe governing pages gained on the opposition, but the gain had gone by the summer.
What the evidence shows
- Across 15 European countries (81,372 posts from 147 pages), interactions with governing pages roughly doubled in the first eight weeks around lockdown, but interactions with opposition pages also rose by about 60%.
- Relative to the opposition, governing pages gained by a factor of 1.34 (95% CI 0.86 to 2.08), or 1.44 (1.05 to 1.96) when weighted by interactions. The gain was concentrated on heads of government's own pages.
- In Britain (274,047 posts from 437 pages), government pages drew 5% of interactions on government, party and politicians' pages before the pandemic and 29% from mid-March to the end of May 2020.
- Laughing and angry reactions, normally common on the government's main page, almost disappeared in the 'stay home' weeks and returned from the week of 11 May 2020.
Caveats
The European estimate's confidence interval with equal weights includes no gain, and between countries neither stringency nor deaths predicted its size.