Patterns of Negative Campaigning during the 2019 European Election: Political Parties’ Facebook Posts and Users’ Sharing Behaviour across Twelve Countries

Abstract

Focusing on the 2019 European Parliament campaign, we investigate parties' engagement in negative campaigning on Facebook and how it is influenced by parties' ideology and their status as governing versus opposition party at the national level. Manual coding of 8,132 Facebook posts of parties from twelve European countries shows that negative posts are less prominent than positive and neutral ones. We also prove that negative posts attract more shares than positive, neutral, and balanced posts, which further increases their prominence on the platform. Hence, users and algorithms are driving negative campaign communication on Facebook to a greater extent than parties.

Political communication in mobile instant messaging services. The strategic use of Telegram as a digital electoral campaign tool

“…However, among these topics, only one is a priority on the agenda of the parties on Telegram during the electoral campaign and the rest have almost no presence. This trend coincides with what was observed on Facebook, in which user participation does not encourage parties to develop an agenda of issues that focuses exclusively on very prominent and own issues, since users do not engage with these issues more than with others (Baranowski et al,2022).…”

“…In this context, the results of the analysis show the influence of factors such as ideology, the position on the government/opposition axis and the party trajectory in the use of political criticism on Telegram. In fact, it has been detected that the usage trends of such mechanism detected in the mobile instant messaging service as it gains importance are opposite to those pointed out by previous literature regarding what happened with criticism on Facebook (Marcos-García, Alonso-Muñoz and Casero-Ripollés, 2021; Baranowski et al, 2022). It is interesting to note how it is the right-wing parties that most resorts to political criticism on Telegram, while the left-wing parties do not show special interest in this function.…”

“…En este contexto, los resultados del análisis demuestran la incidencia de factores como la ideología, la posición en el eje gobierno/oposición y la trayectoria del partido en el uso de la crítica política en Telegram. De hecho, se ha detectado que las tendencias de uso de este mecanismo detectadas en la plataforma móvil de mensajería instantánea conforme esta va adquiriendo importancia son opuestas a las señaladas por la literatura previa con respecto a lo que ocurría con la crítica en Facebook (Marcos-García, Alonso-Muñoz y Casero-Ripollés, 2021; Baranowski et al, 2022). Resulta interesante destacar como en Telegram es la derecha la que más recurre a la crítica política, mientras que los partidos de la izquierda no muestran especial interés por esta función.…”

“…El uso estratégico de Telegram como herramienta digital de campaña electoral -200 -ya que los usuarios no se comprometen con estos temas más que con otros (Baranowski et al,2022).…”

Donate to help us fight back: Political fundraising and toxic rhetoric online

“…Therefore, incivility and polarizing rhetoric are strategically deployed by candidates for greater participation and engagement (Brooks and Geer 2007;Herbst 2010;Mutz 2015;Jamieson et al 2017;Chen 2017;Sydnor 2019). In particular, digital media technologies have been described as producing a culture of outrage, and scholars find that negative social media posts from political entities are rewarded with greater engagement (Blassnig et al 2021;Baranowski et al 2022;Klinger et al 2022;Zeitzoff 2023) while disengaging with social media has been linked to lower degrees of polarization (Allcott et al 2020). Indeed, with many nations rapidly polarizing, there has been a steady decline of civility in political discourse and campaigning documented in the U.S. (Boatright et al 2019;Zeitzoff 2023), Israel (Zeitzoff 2023), and Europe (Klinger et al 2022), primarily on social media.…”