Tonality in campaign communication on Facebook as drivers of divergent users' engagement in Czechia
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| Year of publication | 2022 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | When it comes to campaigning on social networking sites, the political communication tends to be rather one-sided and only few political actors can attract significant attention of users. Research shows that populists politicians are particularly good in reaching broader audiences and stimulating engagement with the content. Research also shows that citizens pay more attention to negative content and tend to engage with such content more, because negative tonality, often used in populist communication, can trigger negative feelings, and thus increase users’ engagement. However, significantly less evidence is present about the effects of positive tonality and positive emotions on users’ engagement. Our study focuses on both negative (like negative tonality and attacking of opponents) and positive (like personalized communication, acclaiming statements) content elements in the political campaign during the Czech national elections in 2021 as the possible predictors of users’ engagement. Besides the content predictors, we also access the Facebook pages/profiles characteristics as the profile outreach and type, focusing on the distinctions among pages of leaders and parties. Additionally, we explore how different tonality of posts drives different types of users' engagement and reactions. To do so, we apply the content analysis method, and we analyse Facebook posts from seven political leaders and seven relevant parties (and coalition) collected during the 30 days before the elections via CrowdTangle (n = 1470). Our analysis will be completed by the time of conference. |
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