Tag: Britain
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Facebook kept pace with public attention. It didn’t lead it.
Comparing Facebook engagement for British parties and leaders with Wikipedia reading and Google searches from 2015 to 2020, the big spikes mostly came on the same day, with no reliable leader, and none of the three came close to the polls.
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Negativity got the clicks: what earned engagement on Labour and Conservative Facebook pages
Hand-coded posts from the 2015 and 2017 election campaigns show that negative posts drew about 20% more likes, comments and shares than other posts on the same page. Pledges made no detectable difference.
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After the referendum: what happened to the SNP on Facebook
The 2014 referendum transformed the SNP, but it didn’t leave the party with a lasting Facebook lead over the big UK parties. It left a bigger, more spread-out presence that rose and fell with the independence question.
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New leader, new crowd: what happened to Labour’s Facebook comments under Corbyn
234,579 comments on Labour’s Facebook page, the same weeks of 2015 and 2016. Under Corbyn the comment section got slightly less toxic, a partly new crowd turned up, and the argument moved from UKIP to Europe.
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A pause in the mockery: what Covid did to British political Facebook
In Britain’s first Covid wave, government pages went from 5% to 29% of the engagement on political Facebook, and the usual laughing at the government’s own page stopped for two months. It came back with “stay alert”, before Cummings.
