Populism and Social Media: A comparative analysis of populists’ shared content and networks on Facebook

Marincea, Adina and Školkay, Andrej and Baloge, Martin and Bertero, Arturo and Bobba, Giuliano and Hubé, Nicolas and Lipiński, Artur and Mancosu, Moreno and Matic, Dejan and Sahin, Osman and Tsatsanis, Emmanouil and Sotiropoulos, Dimitri A. (2021) Populism and Social Media: A comparative analysis of populists’ shared content and networks on Facebook. Working Paper. -. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

Populist politicians and political parties often prefer social media, especially Facebook, for their communication with the public. Populists, as well as radical left and right leaders and parties, especially those on the margins of the mainstream political system and with less access to traditional media, have seen in platforms like Facebook a gateway to direct communication with their audiences, in the wake of elections as well as in non-electoral periods. Despite this, comparative or in some cases, country-specific populist communication on social media remains rather under-studied. To fill this empirical gap, the study explores contemporary populist politicians’ use of various media sources in their Facebook communication strategy, as well as the legacy and alternative media networks that disseminate and amplify their messages. The analysis is carried out at two levels: a) a classification of the media sources that are shared by 17 official Facebook pages of main populist leaders/parties in eight national contexts in Europe, by means of content analysis; b) a network analysis of the social media networks around the 17 populist actors, that share their posts. Facebook was selected for the study because it remains the leading social media platform in all eight countries. The unit of analysis is the URL in each post shared by the 17 populists during three different time-intervals: before and after the European Parliament elections in 2019 (April – June 2019), during regular reporting (July 2019 - February 2020), and at the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis (March-April 2020). This inquiry aims to uncover the types of media and connections between different (social) media sources in propagating populists and the role that traditional versus alternative sources play in this process in different national contexts. The study results contradict some of the assumptions or expectations connected to populist communication and media strategy. For one, we found no prevailing preference for ‘alternative’ media sources that commonly disseminate hyper-partisan news or hoaxes and disinformation. Populists are more prone to creating and disseminating their own political content or even drawing on the legitimacy of legacy media. However, their choice of media sources reflects their political orientation and ideology, which serves to create an echo-chamber that can reinforce political beliefs. Left-wing media is scarce among most populists in our study, while centre-right and even far-right sources are dominant. This reflects not only the predominance of right-wing populism in Europe, but also how some populist leaders’ social media pages can be seen as places of radicalisation, most commonly towards the far right. This tendency is reinforced by populists’ networks that distribute and amplify their messages. The main disseminators in their networks are their party and party colleagues, as well as different political fan groups that support them or oppose their political rivals.

Item Type:	Monograph (Working Paper)
Title in English:	Populism and Social Media: A comparative analysis of populists’ shared content and networks on Facebook
Keywords in English:	populism, social media, Facebook communication of populist leaders, network of interconnections, European Parliament elections, COVID-19 pandemic, CrowdTangle, quantitative and qualitative content analysis, network analysis
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General) H Social Sciences > HM Sociology J Political Science > JA Political science (General)
Divisions:	Institute for Political Science
Research funder:	European Union, Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Action DEMOS grant no. 822590
Depositing User:	Enikő Meiszterics
Date Deposited:	23 Sep 2021 09:30
Last Modified:	24 Sep 2021 10:02
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URI:	https://openarchive.tk.mta.hu/id/eprint/490

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