Tristan Hotham

What Does a Satellite Campaign Do? Momentum, the Labour Party and Jeremy Corbyn on Facebook in the 2017 General Election

Satellite campaigns, organisations that campaign for a party without being part of it, became a visible part of British elections in 2017. The best known was Momentum, formed to support Jeremy Corbyn's leadership of the Labour Party. I ask what Momentum's Facebook page did that L...

Does the Democracy Matter? Party Facebook Engagement in Six Smaller European Democracies, 2010 to 2020

Does the state of a country's democracy show up in how people engage with its parties on Facebook? I use 184,317 posts from 35 official party pages in Finland, Lithuania, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia and Switzerland, posted between 2010 and October 2020, with 60.6 million interact...

Does Facebook Lead Public Attention or Follow It? Facebook Engagement, Wikipedia Pageviews and Google Searches for British Parties and Leaders, 2015 to 2020

Engagement on politicians' Facebook pages is often read as a sign of public interest. I ask how closely it tracks two free measures of public attention, Wikipedia pageviews and Google searches, and whether it moves before or after them. I use 93,567 posts from 32 British pages (1...

Launched the Same Week: Podemos, Vox and Facebook in Spain, 2014 to 2020

Podemos and Vox were both presented to the press in Madrid in the same week of January 2014. Podemos won 8% of the vote at the European election four months later and 21% with its regional allies at the general election of December 2015. Vox won 0.2% in 2015 and 2016, then 11% at...

Ahead of the Polls? Sinn Féin, Facebook and the 2020 Irish General Election

Sinn Féin's first place in the Irish general election of February 2020 surprised most observers. The party had lost half its council seats in May 2019 and polled at about 14% in October and November. I ask whether Facebook saw the surge coming. Using 297,790 posts from 357 Irish...

After the Referendum: The SNP, Plaid Cymru and Facebook, 2014 to 2020

The 2014 Scottish independence referendum transformed the Scottish National Party. Its membership roughly quadrupled, and eight months later it won 56 of Scotland's 59 Westminster seats. I ask what happened to the SNP on Facebook after the referendum, comparing it with the UK-wid...

Outdrawing the Candidate: A Campaign-Linked Page and the Facebook Campaigns of Trump and Biden in 2020

On Facebook, a presidential campaign is carried by more pages than the candidate's own. I compare 17 pages on the two sides of the 2020 United States presidential campaign: the candidates', running mate's, campaign and party pages, several Trump family pages, and a campaign-linke...

Not a Forecast: The Radical Right on Facebook in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, 2014 to 2020

Radical-right parties often draw more engagement on Facebook than their share of the vote would suggest. Does that advantage tell us anything about where their support is heading? I compare three established radical-right parties in Scandinavia: the Sweden Democrats (SD), the Pro...

A Pause in the Mockery: Government, Party and Politician Pages on Facebook in Britain's First Covid-19 Wave

When a crisis strikes, does political attention turn from parties to government? I test this on Facebook in Britain using 274,047 posts from 437 political pages tracked by CrowdTangle between June 2018 and October 2020: government and Parliament pages, party pages and politicians...

Different Campaigns, Similar Totals: Republican and Democratic Senate Candidates on Facebook in 2020

Facebook is often said to reward the American right. I test the claim on matched pairs: the Facebook pages of the Democratic and Republican nominees in 20 contested 2020 US Senate races, over the final eight weeks before 28 October 2020 (8,125 posts from CrowdTangle). Democrats p...

New Leader, New Crowd: Labour's Facebook Comment Section from Miliband to Corbyn

Jeremy Corbyn's election as Labour leader in September 2015 brought a surge of new members and a reputation for an unusually energetic, and unusually combative, online following. I test what changed in the place where that following met the party most directly: the comment sectio...

Who Gets to Be in the Picture? Political Identity Ownership on Labour and Conservative Facebook Pages at the 2015 and 2017 General Elections

Parties do not only tell voters what they will do. They also show voters who they are for. Kreiss, Lawrence and McGregor call this political identity ownership: the work a party does to be seen as the natural home of particular groups of people. I test the idea with 1,208 hand-co...

Setting the Tone or Supplying the Words? Donald Trump's Facebook Posts and the Hostility of His Comment Section in the 2016 Republican Primaries

Do politicians set the tone of the conversations beneath their posts? I link 730 posts on Donald Trump's Facebook page during the 2016 Republican primaries to the 5.1 million comments that could be retrieved beneath them, and measure toxicity with an open classifier on a sample o...

Who Speaks in the Candidate's Comment Section? Participation, Toxicity and Reward on Donald Trump's and Hillary Clinton's Facebook Pages in 2016

In 2016 the comment sections under Donald Trump's and Hillary Clinton's Facebook posts drew millions of comments. Who took part, how hostile were they, and was hostility rewarded? I study 5.2 million comments: every comment that could be retrieved from 730 posts on Trump's page d...

Who Carries the Party on Facebook? Leaders, Party Pages and the Polls in Britain, 2010 to 2020

Is a British party's Facebook audience built around its leader or its party page, and does either track the polls? I use 89,110 posts from the pages of eight parties and eighteen of their leaders between June 2010 and October 2020, which drew 218 million interactions, and match t...