Article published in:
Re/constructing Politics Through Social & Online Media: Discourses, ideologies, and mediated political practices
Edited by Michał Krzyżanowski and Joshua A. Tucker
[Journal of Language and Politics 17:2] 2018
► pp. 173–194

Political participation on Facebook during Brexit

Does user engagement on media pages stimulate engagement with campaigns?

| University of Copenhagen
| Lund University
| University of Copenhagen

This study investigates, over an 18-month period surrounding the 2016 Brexit referendum, the commenting activity of nearly 2 million Facebook users engaging with political news from British media or with the posts of referendum campaigns. We ask whether citizens’ engagement with political news on Facebook motivates their participation with political campaign posts, and we examine whether users commenting on campaign pages trend towards ideologically reinforcing media. Overall, we find comparatively low levels of commenting activity on the official referendum campaigns vis-à-vis the media, and the majority of users (70%) commented only once. Looking at the subset of users commenting on both page types (“cross-posters”), we identify a general spillover effect from media to campaign pages, suggesting a positive correlation between political interest and online participation on Facebook. Reverse spillover occurs immediately around and after the vote, with Remain cross-posters active on the Guardian while Leave cross-posters’ media engagement registers as more diffuse.

Keywords: political campaigning, referendum, public pages, Facebook comments, social media, big data, political communication, polarization
Published online: 20 November 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.17009.dut
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