Category: Research papers
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From the doorstep to the debate: what Momentum did on Facebook after 2017
In the 2017 election half of Momentum’s Facebook posts asked people to knock on doors or volunteer. A year later almost none did. The page became more negative and turned its fire on the media, newspapers and MPs.
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Who gets to be in the picture? How Labour and the Conservatives swapped places on Facebook
I hand-coded who appeared in 1,208 Labour and Conservative Facebook posts at the 2015 and 2017 elections. In 2015 the Conservatives showed more of the public, more young people and more of modern Britain. By 2017 the parties had swapped places.
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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.
