Short answer
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.
What the evidence shows
- The thesis drew on 49,551 extracted Facebook posts, 1,481 hand-coded posts, Facebook Audience Insights and survey data.
- It found that Facebook was used centrally to recreate a traditional offline campaign: information provision mattered far more than participation.
- Satellite pages let parties campaign in more adventurous ways, with a strong focus on participation and partisan viral content, without threatening the traditional campaign.
- Parties also built 'virtual memberships' on Facebook that were larger and more representative than their official memberships.
Caveats
The thesis covers British parties up to 2018. Whether parties elsewhere, or on other platforms, run the same two-faced model is an open question.