Keep Them Engaged! Investigating the Effects of Self-centered Social Media Communication Style on User Engagement in 12 European Countries

Bene, Márton; Cerón, Andrea; Fenoll, Vicente; Haßler, Jörg; Kruschinski, Simon; Larsson, Anders; Magin, Melanie; Schlosser, Katharina; Wurst, Anna-Katharina

doi:10.1080/10584609.2022.2042435

Cited by 38 publications

(38 citation statements)

References 60 publications

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“…Our second contribution was also linked to RQ1 and offers insightful evidence on the distribution of the number of retweets. Conspiracy theories and immigration/security were the issues that fostered more interaction, being aligned with other recent works on social media (Bene et al, 2022). Both can be identified as traditional topics of extreme right-wing populism.…”

Section: Conclusion and Discussionmentioning

confidence: 53%

Building extreme right discourses on Twitter for non-campaign periods: insights from populist leaders across Europe

Rivas-de-Roca

Curiel

García-Gordillo

2022

(OBS*)

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The growing success of extreme right-wing populist parties changed the political state of play in Europe, which has been widely studied by the literature. Populist parties apply a particular communication style, based on simple and non-mediated messages on social media that promote distrust in public institutions. However, the ways in which these strategies are applied for non-campaigns weeks remain little addressed by academia, as well as its development in small countries. This study examines how far-right leaders from European countries with different sizes and historical extremist backgrounds used Twitter during a non-campaign period (29 September 2020 to 28 February 2021). Specifically, we analyze the issues (issue frame), strategies (game frame), and propaganda mechanisms employed through a mixture of quantitative and qualitative approaches. The sample includes the messages posted on Twitter (n=1346) by the leaders of the main far-right parties in France (Rassemblement National), Austria (FPÖ), Germany (AfD), Spain (Vox), and Portugal (Chega!). A manual content analysis was applied, allowing comparison of countries with different traditions regarding the Extreme Right. The results show a common pattern of anti-migration messages as the main topic for their communication style, but some differences are found in terms of agenda and propaganda. The most recent parties (AfD, Vox, and Chega!) rarely use Twitter tools, which means leaving behind the interactive capacity of social media; meanwhile, the agenda is less thematic in the Austrian and Portuguese cases. Our research contributes to discussions about the communication practices of far-right populist parties in Europe, identifying trends by country as the binary opposition between the people and the elite is not expressed through the same type of propaganda.

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Section: Conclusion and Discussionmentioning

confidence: 53%

Building extreme right discourses on Twitter for non-campaign periods: insights from populist leaders across Europe

Rivas-de-Roca

Curiel

García-Gordillo

2022

(OBS*)

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“…Furthermore, in relation to H3, there is a good reason to believe that partisanship of audiences might be a more relevant driver of political actors' news sharing behavior in countries, in which political parallelism is strong. However, previous multi-country studies on mechanisms of political communication on social media tend to find that country differences only play a minor role (Bene et al 2022;Ernst et al 2019). We, therefore, formulate an open research question: How similar are the described mechanisms (H1-H3) across countries?…”

Section: Generalizability Of Effects Across Western European Democraciesmentioning

confidence: 94%

My Voters Should See This! What News Items Are Shared by Politicians on Facebook?

Heidenreich

Eberl

Tolochko

et al. 2022

The International Journal of Press/Politics

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Political actors play an increasingly important role in the dissemination of political information on social media. However, relatively little is known about the mechanisms why specific news items are shared with the support base instead of others. For a timespan between December 2017 and the end of 2018, we combine the analysis of Facebook content from 1,022 politicians associated with 20 political parties from Germany, Spain, and the UK, with an automated content analysis of media coverage from 22 major online news outlets, and survey data in a multilevel binomial regression approach. By comparing news items that have been shared by one or several political parties with news items that have not been shared by any of them, we overcome the selection biases of previous studies in the field of news dissemination. Findings show that a news item's likelihood to be shared by a politician increases (1) if that politician's party is mentioned in the news item, (2) the more salient their party's owned issues are in the news item, and (3) the more party supporters tend to read the news outlet in which the news item is published. We contextualize these findings in light of political actors’ multi-faceted motivations for news sharing on social media and discuss how this process potentially reinforces an information bias that may contribute to the polarization and fragmentation of audiences.

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“…Overall, different content strategies can contribute to users' responses, engagement, and sentiments [ 46 , 47 ]. Currently, Facebook enables to classify of the types of audiences sentiments by distinguishing between different types of possible reactions, such as positive sentiments, for example (Love, care, laughter, and wow) or those that carry a negative sentiment: (Angry, sad) [ 42 , 48 ].…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Information under lockdown: A content analysis of government communication strategies on Facebook during the COVID-19 outbreak

Yavetz¹,

Aharony²

2023

Heliyon

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Keep Them Engaged! Investigating the Effects of Self-centered Social Media Communication Style on User Engagement in 12 European Countries

Cited by 38 publications

References 60 publications

Building extreme right discourses on Twitter for non-campaign periods: insights from populist leaders across Europe

Building extreme right discourses on Twitter for non-campaign periods: insights from populist leaders across Europe

My Voters Should See This! What News Items Are Shared by Politicians on Facebook?

Information under lockdown: A content analysis of government communication strategies on Facebook during the COVID-19 outbreak

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