Author: Tristan Hotham
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Do populists win on Facebook? Ten years of party pages across Europe
I looked at 669,760 posts from party pages in 17 European countries. Populist parties got about two and a half times the engagement of comparable parties, but mostly because they built bigger audiences, and not in every country.
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Same message, thousands of times: what British parties really did with targeted Facebook ads
In 2019 everyone feared microtargeting. Twenty thousand party ads later, the big parties had written a few slogans and run them thousands of times. A new preprint from my 2017 and 2019 election data.
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Facebook loved Corbyn and Farage. The polls had other ideas.
Ten years of Facebook data on Britain’s parties and their leaders, matched to the polls. Who carried each party online, how badly Facebook misread the electorate, and what engagement does and does not tell you.
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Trump’s YouTube numbers looked like a vote predictor. They mostly weren’t.
I took a county-by-county record of YouTube views of Trump and Clinton content in 2016 and asked what it adds once you know where a place already stood. Less than you would think, but not nothing.
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Did Leave win the Facebook referendum by being negative? What 17,657 posts say
The popular story is that Leave won on Facebook by being louder, angrier and more negative. A new preprint tests it on 17,657 posts from 92 UK pages during the 2016 referendum campaign.
