Although populist communication has become pervasive throughout Europe, many important questions on its political consequences remain unanswered. First, previous research has neglected the differential effects of populist communication on the Left and Right. Second, internationally comparative studies are missing. Finally, previous research mostly studied attitudinal outcomes, neglecting behavioral effects. To address these key issues, this paper draws on a unique, extensive, and comparative experiment in sixteen European countries (N = 15,412) to test the effects of populist communication on political engagement. The findings show that anti-elitist populism has the strongest mobilizing effects, and anti-immigrant messages have the strongest demobilizing effects. Moreover, national conditions such as the level of unemployment and the electoral success of the populist Left and Right condition the impact of populist communication. These findings provide important insights into the persuasiveness of populist messages spread throughout the European continent.

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The overwhelming amount of information and misinformation on social media platforms has created a new role that these platforms are inclined to take on, that of the Internet custodian. Mainstream platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, are under tremendous public and political pressure to combat disinformation and remove harmful content. Meanwhile, smaller platforms, such as BitChute and Odysee, have emerged and provide fertile ground for disinformation as a result of their low content-moderation policy. In this study, we analyze the phenomenon of removed content migration from YouTube to BitChute and Odysee. In particular, starting from a list of COVID-related videos removed from YouTube due to violating its misinformation policy, we find that ∼15% (1114 videos) of them migrated to the two low content-moderation platforms under study. This amounts to 4096 videos on BitChute and 1810 on Odysee. We present an analysis of this video dataset, revealing characteristics of misinformation dissemination similar to those on YouTube and other mainstream social media platforms. The BitChute–Odysee COVID-related dataset is publicly available for research purposes on misinformation analysis.

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