Abstract
A party that posts a link on Facebook chooses where to send its followers. I classify the destinations of 410,308 link posts made by 112 party pages and 74 party leaders' pages in 20 European countries from 2010 to 2020 by the domain of each link. Hand-built lists, with every domain linked 63 times or more reviewed by hand, cover 95% of link posts, and a page-by-page mapping identifies each party's and leader's own sites. The mix shifted from own sites to news media. Own sites took 58% of link posts in 2010 and 35% to 39% from 2016, while news media rose from 17% to between 36% and 43% each year from 2017. Video platforms, mostly YouTube, peaked at 14% in 2014 and then fell to about 2%. Leaders' pages linked much more to news and much less to own sites than party pages. Comparing posts by the same page in the same country and month, links to news drew the most engagement: links to own sites drew about 18% fewer interactions, video links 24% fewer, links to other social platforms 47% fewer and links to events, petitions and other campaign tools 86% fewer. From 2018 news links were the only link destination that matched photos. Populist parties did not link detectably more to their own sites or less to news than other parties. I could not build a defensible cross-national list of alternative news outlets, so that comparison is not made.
Questions this answers
Cite
Hotham, T. (2026). Where Parties Send People: The Destinations of Links Posted by European Parties and Leaders on Facebook, 2010 to 2020. Preprint, Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23416928