Politainment social audience and political engagement: Analysing Twitter conversations in Spain

Abstract

Politainment is a phenomenon that deals with the political communication of entertainment regarding its production, diffusion and intake in its different formats. It entails consequences regarding the dynamics of communication such as political informative decline, along with the loss of democratic quality giving prominence to a post-truth communication environment and promoting the celebritization of politicians. The academic basis upholds that, in the politainment environment, social networks play an important role acting as instruments that help promote information exchange, both horizontally and vertically, from an active, connected, empowered social audience which evidences participation, contribution, production and collaboration. This research is pioneer in identifying the kind of contents of politainment programmes that promote a greater engagement among the social audience. Therefore, it includes an empirical analysis from a quantitative and qualitative approach of the contents of tweets and comments with the highest level of interaction among prosumers from the profiles of the three most representative politainment programmes in Spain: El Objetivo, El programa de Ana Rosa and El Intermedio. The results achieved from this comparative analysis include significant differences regarding the politainment content promoted by these programmes and also in relation to the level of online engagement. Although the limited interaction from the social audience was a common pattern, the results show that tweets with hashtags, visual elements and the ones using the attribute of responsibility frame achieved a higher engagement level than the rest of them.

TikTok and Political Communication: The Latest Frontier of Politainment? A Case Study

“…Altogether these conclusions are applicable beyond Peru. Aligning with previous works, such as Berrocal-Gonzalo et al's (2021), which analyzed new actors (native and peripheral) and their use of new strategies, we can expect that within this new platform, originally meant for entertainment (Abidin, 2020), politainment will become prominent.…”

Politainment en campaña: el engagement en la audiencia social de Twitter

“…Se confirma así nuestra hipótesis de que este tipo de programas con contenido relacionado con la espectacularización de la política (noticias suaves, parodia, tratamiento superficial, entre otros aspectos) puede implicar un mayor grado de engagement en la medida en la que se intensifican algunos encuadres específicos vinculados con los recursos emocionales y la personalización, lo que incrementará el nivel de implicación por parte de la ciudadanía. Estos datos están en la línea de los resultados de investigaciones previas sobre Twitter y politainment (Berrocal, Zamora-Medina y Rebolledo, 2021;Baviera, Peris y Cano-Orón, 2019).…”

“…En este sentido, también existen estudios relevantes sobre el uso del infoentretenimiento político en Twitter (Berrocal, Zamora-Medina y Rebolledo, 2021;Baviera, Peris y Cano-Orón, 2019;López-Meri, Marcos-García y Casero-Ripollés, 2017), o Facebook (Durántez-Stolle y Martínez-Sanz, 2019. Recientemente, algunos estudios también se han centrado en la participación colectiva relacionada con el uso de Youtube (Berrocal, Campos-Domínguez, Redondo-García, 2012) o incluso el papel de los prosumidores en Youtube (Berrocal, Campos-Domínguez y Redondo, 2014;Berrocal, Gil Torres;Campos-Domínguez, 2016).…”

Securing the Youth Vote: A Comparative Analysis of Digital Persuasion on TikTok Among Political Actors

“…In the context of "pop politics" Mazzoleni & Bracciale, 2019) and politainment (Berrocal et al, 2021), visual images are gaining more importance (Veneti et al, 2019); consequently, the irruption of TikTok embodies a new challenge for political contexts (Medina-Serrano et al, 2020). This short-video-based social network had an exponential growth in popularity during the global lockdown that took place in 2020, reaching two billion downloads and 800 million monthly active users worldwide by the end of 2020 and 205 million downloads in the second quarter of 2021 (Statista, 2023a).…”