The #Brexit on the Facebook pages of the European institutions

Abstract

The Brexit referendum was among the first major public events where online users had no "slacktivism" reactions and they led the entire debate and popular will from the inside of the online world to the real world. It is becoming increasingly clear that Social Media is becoming an increasingly powerful tool in political debates, and during the parliamentary, presidential, European parliamentary or even referendum elections, it becomes the channel that can decide the final outcome. However, the debate in the online environment can be altered by two important factors: (1) political bots - which can manipulate public opinion by posting in a large number of fake news and (2) "slacktivism" reactions from online users. , who are content only to quickly distribute unverified information or to push impulse driven on the "like" button and to scroll further. This study focused on analyzing the frequency with which European institutions spoke about Brexit on their Facebook pages and on identifying and analyzing the messages that generate high engagement from users. Thus, we will analyze all the posts published by the three major European institutions - the European Commission, the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union - starting on the first day after the Brexit Referendum in the UK (24 June 2016) until 24 June 2019.

Unveiling Community Dynamics on Instagram Political Network

“…Authors of [7] study users' interactions, highlighting provoking and humorous posts in the political debate via Twitter. Authors of [20] analyze the political debate around Brexit via Facebook. Both works illustrate how users' behavior is strongly associated with intentions, e.g., the dissemination of ideas or missinformation through users' interactions.…”

On the dynamics of political discussions on Instagram: A network perspective

“…Online discussions have also been studied in the context of other platforms. For example, Tanase et al [12] studied the political debate around the Brexit on Facebook, analyzing messages that generated higher engagement from users. In [37], the authors developed a system to detect political ads on Facebook and used it to present evidence of misuse during the Brazilian 2018 elections.…”

“…We then look for statistical differences between communities based on the average values of the attributes. For Brazil, we identify 62 attributes (from the 64 available in LIWC's Portuguese dictionary) for which differences across communities are statistically significant 12 . For Italy, we identify 77 (from 83 available in the LIWC Italian dictionary).…”

“…Not a surprise, political personalities are increasingly leveraging Instagram to reach the population at scale. Understanding how users interact with each other is paramount to uncover how information is disseminated in the platform and how the online debate impacts our society [10,11,7,12,5,13,14]. Prior studies of user behavior on Instagram mainly focused on user engagement based on content type [15,16,17,18,19,20], general characteristics of comments associated with political messages [21,22] and the impact of the posted content on marketing contexts [16,23,24].…”