FV22 - Party leaders on Facebook during the 2022 parliament election in Denmark
The 2022 Danish parliament election is coming up, and the political campaigns are in full swing. The parties are using social media to reach out to voters, and Facebook is one the most popular platforms. In this post, I will look at the Facebook pages of the parties and their leaders, and see how they are using the platform to reach out to voters and how they are performing.
The dataset contains on all the public Facebook pages of the party leaders and the posts they have made from 01/01/2022 -> 25/10/2022.
Pages and followers
Reach is not distributed equally across the party leaders on Facebook. When looking at the number of followers each of the party leaders have, the difference is immense. From the least popular page, Marianne Karlsmose (Kristendemokraterne) - barely visible on the bar chart - with 2 thousand followers, to the most popular page belonging to the current prime minister Mette Frederiksen (Socialdemokratiet) with 384 thousand followers.
Hence, some will have a much easier time reaching out to potential voters than other, and gain traction to their campaign. The two prominent previous members of the party Venstre have a large following on the platform. The previous minister of Immigration and Integration Inger Støjberg comes next in line with 217 thousand followers on her page. Meanwhile, the former prime minister and current spearhead of his new political party Moderaterne Lars Løkke Rasmussen has 213 thousand followers on his Facebook page.
Posting activity
Looking a the number of posts since the beginning of the year, we see a large spread, with 356 from Sikandar Siddique (Frie Grønne) as the most frequent poster having almost 3 times as many posts as the least frequent poster, Inger Støjberg (Danmarksdemokraterne) 128 posts.
Siddique’s party De Frie Grønne, has had an uphill battle for gaining enough votes to get into parliament. Støjberg on the other hand, has spend the spring outside the parliament and political system due to her conviction in the impeachment trial. While Siddique has kept his activity high, Støjberg has ramped up her activity since then, and is so far the one who has made the most posts during the election period.
We can also see that Morten Messerschmidt (Dansk Folkeparti), has also been very active on Facebook, which may be an attempt to regain the party’s previous popularity, since he took over leadership in the end of January. He has however been less active since the announcement of the election, perhaps a sign that he has been demotivated by his party’s poor performance, or perhaps because he prioritizes other venues. The third most active party leader is Mette Frederiksen (Socialdemokratiet) - the current Prime Minister - with 274 posts.
Looking at the 7 days rolling mean number of posts per day, we can see a huge increase in posts since the election was announced on the 5th of October. The average activity about doubles, from around 10 posts per day, to more than 20 posts per day.
I find it particularyly interesting that the increase in post only follows the actual announcement of the election, and that the politicians did not increase their activity significantly even though it was very clear that the announcement would come that week.
Looking at the source of the post, ie. the post’s origin of platform, we see that while most of the posts are made natively on Facebook, some of the politicians repost their Instagram posts on their Facebook profile.
This is especially true for Mette Frederiksen, for who almost 9 out of 10 posts are reposts from Instagram. This follows the general narrative, that she is indeed very active on Instagram, and that her visual identity there is important to her image.
The 2nd most frequent reposter is Mai Villadsen (Enhedslisten), who reposts about 7 out of 10 posts from Instagram. Then comes Lars Løkke Rasmussen (Moderaterne), with a bit more than 2 out of 10 posts, followed by Pia Olsen Dyhr (Socialistisk Folkeparti), Sofie Carsten Nielsen (Radikale Venstre), Sikandar Siddique, Søren Pape Poulsen (Konservative) and Morten Messerschmidt, all with less than 1 out of 10 posts being reposts.
Post performance
Looking at this (admittedly rather messy) plot we can see Mette Frederiksens success on Facebook. She frequently receives a lot of reactions (emojis) on her posts, and that they also generate a lot of activity in terms of comments (size of the circles).
Some runner ups are Alex Vanopslagh (Liberal Alliance), Pernille Vermund (Nye Borgerlige) and Inger Støjberg. Both Jakob Ellemann and Morten Messerschmidt have single posts that have generated a lot of interactions, their general level lies much lover.
While noting that the y-axis on the graph is logarithmic, it’s very clear tn -hat the distribution is skewed. The buttom performers are Marianne Karlsmose (Kristendemokraterne) and, Franciska Rosenkilde (Alternativet) and Sofie Carsten Nielsen. Especially Karlsmose receives very few reactions (54), comments (8) and shares (7) on average on her posts.
In contrast the top performers for each category are, Mette Frederiksen with ~8800 likes and ~1600 comments per post and Alex Vanopslagh with ~353 shares per post.
A reaction on Facebook can be devided into one of 7 emojis. An emoji reaction to a post may be interpreted differently depending on the context of the post. None the less, we can see that the most common reaction is by far the like accounting for more than 85% of all reactions. This is followed by the heart, the care emoji and the laughing emoji.
The angry emoji is generally very infrequent with only 1% of all reactions. However, Sofie Carsten Nielsen receives a bit more than 7% angry emotes on average on her posts. Does this mean that many people are angry at something she wrote because they disagree with her? Or is the angry emoji a sign of agreement of the posts a negative sentiment?
Post content
Posts of course also vary in content. While the average length of a post is ~861 characters including spaces, the most enduring keyboard warrior Alex Vanopslagh’s posts are almost 1350 character long on average, while the runner up Pernille Vermund has posts that are on average 1239 characters long.
On the other end of the spectrum we find Marianne Karlmose, whose posts are on average 443 characters long, followed by Mette Frederiksen with 620. The rest of the party leaders are fairly close to the average.
The sentiment of the posts is measured using the senda model, which is a Danish sentiment analysis transformer trained on Danish tweets. A post may either be labeled as positive, neutral or negative.
In total, about 39% of the posts may be labeled as having positive sentiment, while 14% of the posts are labeled as having a neutral sentiment. The remaining 47% of the posts are labeled as having a negative sentiment.
The politician with the most positive content is no other than the prime minister Mette Frederiksen, with 7 out of 10 posts having a positive sentiment, and only 15% of her posts having a negative sentiment. The party leaders with the next most frequent positive content are Lars Løkke and Marianne Karlsmose, both with 6 out of 10 posts having a positive sentiment.
Many politicians prioritize posts with a negative sentiment instead, and on the other end of the scale we find Sikandar Siddique, who has 7 out of 10 posts with a negative sentiment. This is followed by Pernille Vermund, Alex Vanopslagh and Mai Villadsen, all with at least 6 out of 10 posts having a negative sentiment.
Looking at the development in sentiment over time we see a lot of variation, but no overall movement towards one or the other end of the sentiment poles.
In february the sentiment turns more negative, perhaps as a consequence of the looming Russian invasion of Ukraine. During the election the sentiment seems to increase steeply in the days leading up the the announcement, and then falling from that during the weeks of the election campaign.
However, the sample size is rather low, and the sentiment model is not perfect, so we should perhaps not read too much into this.
The end
This was a very brief overview of the Facebook activity of the Danish party leaders. I hope you enjoyed it, and if you have any questions or comments, please feel free to reach out to me on any of the platforms in the page footer or use the contact form in the page header.
What’s next?
Doing the same thing just for their Instagram posts 💪