The Online Communication of Political Parties and their Leaders Reacting to Street Protests in Romania

Abstract

At the beginning of 2017 massive protests took place on the streets of the biggest cities in Romania, unprecedented in the post-Decembrist history of the country. They were caused by a decree passed by the government that was meant to decriminalize certain offences, including official misconduct. In situations such as social movements on a larger scale, the communication flow on social networking platforms, especially on Facebook, which is the most popular social media platform in Romania, increases exponentially (Tufekci & Wilson, 2012;Valenzuela, 2013). In this context, the present paper focuses on the analysis of the social media communication of the main political parties and their leaders. The communication strategy expressed especially on Facebook is interesting, because it is preferred by a large part of the protest participants (for information regarding Facebook groups of protesters see Adi & Lilleker, 2018). The central question of the present paper revolves around the way in which political parties and leaders communicated during the aforementioned protests. We have carried out a computer-assisted frequency analysis and have analyzed 15 Facebook accounts of the main political parties and their leaders during the period January 18 th -March 5 th 2017, which corresponds to the period of the protests.According to Facebrands.ro, a Romanian monitoring service of Facebook accounts nationwide 3 , in 2017, 50% of users were women and 50% were men. The top three age categories of users are the following: most of them are 25-34 years old (26.83%), followed by users aged 18-24 years old (21.47%) and 35-44 years old (21.15%). Other age groups are the following: 45-54 years old (12.63%), 13-17 years old (9.24%), followed by 55-64 years old (6.16%) and by users aged 65+ (2.53%). Most of them are married (68.04%), while only 22.6% of them are single, 8.2% are in a relationship and 1.09% are engaged. These number and figures show that this social networking platform reaches a significant proportion of Romanian Internet users, considering that almost half of all Romanian Internet users are present on Facebook and most of them are relatively young. This segment of the population that is present on social media is the same segment that represents the working force of the country directly affected by any political action or decision. For politicians, the fact that they can address this population segment directly through this communication tool should be perceived as an asset and should be fully used. Whether this is the case will be shown in the following chapters.We will focus on the created dialogue, or to be specific, on the use or lack of reactions and responses from the main political parties and leaders towards the issues. By using a computer-assisted analysis, we analyzed online materials published by the abovementioned country's representatives on their Facebook profiles during the period of the protests, in order to see how they acted and reacted during the protests, how active (number of posts) and how involve...

Populist Dimension of Mediated Discourses About Corruption in Romania

“…Apart from news portals, the online media diet of the Romanian news consumers is defined by Facebook (Balaban et. al., 2018;Mucundorfeanu, 2019). As elsewhere in Europe, political communicators in Romania have turned to the internet not only to avoid media gatekeepers and directly address audiences but have also been successfully employing social media to set the news agenda (Mucundorfeanu, 2019).…”

“…al., 2018;Mucundorfeanu, 2019). As elsewhere in Europe, political communicators in Romania have turned to the internet not only to avoid media gatekeepers and directly address audiences but have also been successfully employing social media to set the news agenda (Mucundorfeanu, 2019). At the same time, protest movements also made extensive use of social media platform for organizational as well as expressive purposes, including identity (Burean.…”

“…Reuters noted that those who were protesting were mostly concerned with what they perceived to be an abuse of power (Reuters, 2017), and the BBC reported that protests continued even after the Government had decided to repeal the ordinance (BBC, 2017). Protests lasted almost seven weeks, during which social media played a significant role in enabling political communication between the main actors involved (Mucundorfeanu, 2019).…”