Facebook as a media digest: user engagement and party references to hostile and friendly media during an election campaign

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates how parties spread news from traditional media on their social network accounts to engage followers. In particular, we address why parties would choose to include in the ‘media digest’ they carefully craft for their followers also content from ‘hostile’ media outlets and journalists. We analyze 4,586 Facebook posts published by the main Italian parties during the 2019 European election campaign, assessing the impact on readers’ engagement of counter-attitudinal and pro-attitudinal content from either hostile or friendly media. Our results show that parties skillfully exploit friendly and hostile sources alike to alternatively engage or outrage their followers.

KEYWORDS:

• Media hostility
• media diet
• user engagement
• political communication
• elections
• social media

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/19331681.2022.2157360

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Università degli Studi di Milano under the Seal of Excellence (SoE) SEED 2020 Project POPULITE - POPUlist Language in ITalian political Elites (Project n. 1090). This publication is part of the CamforS “Campaigning for Strasbourg” research network, which involves scientists from 12 European universities to study digital campaign strategies during the European Election Campaign 2019. We thank all the members of the network for their support and their help with data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Annunziata, Gruber and Lerner are popular journalist and talk show hosts commonly considered as left leaning.

2. Facebook posts can mobilize citizens, increase voter turnout, boost donations, and enhance participation in offline political rallies (Bronstein, 2013).

3. If many partisan supporters of rival parties would engage with a party’s post, turning it into a battlefield for contestation and virtual clashes (by commenting on it), we would have observed a difference when analyzing the comments compared to “likes” or shares. Instead, we found similar results on the different outcome variables.

4. See: https://www.lavoce.info/archives/43279/il-giornalismo-e-gli-italiani-una-crisi-di-ideologia/

5. We collected them four weeks after the election to avoid bias for posts that were published late.

6. See the Online Appendix for details.

7. “Viminale” is the colloquial name of the Ministry of the Interior.

8. See the Online Appendix for descriptive statistics and details on data collection.

9. The post refers to an Italian furniture producer and retailer, whose crisis and subsequent shutdown is attributed by the M5S to the choices taken by the previous cabinet.

10. The “Captain” (“il Capitano”) is the nickname of Salvini.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andrea Ceron

Andrea Ceron is Associate Professor in political science at the Università degli Studi di Milano. His research focuses on intra-party politics and social media analysis. His recent publications include, amongst others, articles in the British Journal of Political Science, the European Journal of Political Research, New Media & Society, and Political Communication.

Giovanni Pagano

Giovanni Pagano is a post-doctoral researcher at the Università degli Studi di Milano. His research interests include political communication and election campaigning, with a particular focus on how to measure preferences of elites and social media users. E-mail: [email protected].

Margherita Bordignon

Margherita Bordignon is a post-doctoral researcher at the Università degli Studi di Pavia. Her research focuses on elites’ and influencers’ communication and behavior on social media. E-mail: [email protected].