Politicians as media opinion leaders? Analyzing user engagement with news shared by politicians on social media.

In the past decade, politicians have become more and more familiar with social media as platforms for public communication. Research shows that politicians adopt social media for many different purposes, including promotion (Hoffmann et al., 2016): they aim to bring attention to relevant topics and distribute political messages to enhance their personal profile and to reach out to potential supporters. On social media, this is done by engaging primary (followers) and secondary (other people in their respective networks) audiences (Vaccari & Valeriani, 2015). Politicians often share links to news stories from mainstream or alternative outlets, which are similarly dependent on the reach of their articles with primary and secondary audiences (Karlsen, 2015). Thus, when sharing news on social media, politicians act as media opinion leaders (Katz & Lazarsfeld, 1955), affecting the reach of news media, but the motives for and the effects of this practice have not yet been thoroughly examined. This study focuses on the public impact of politicians’ news sharing behavior on Facebook in three European countries. More specifically, we will investigate user engagement with news shared on the Facebook-pages of politicians in Belgium, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. Drawing from an exhaustive dataset of Facebook-posts published by over 500 Flemish (BE), Dutch and English (UK) politicians active on the national level (prime ministers, junior and senior ministers, MPs and party chairs) between 01/10/2020 and 31/01/2021, we selected all posts that contained a reference to an identifiable news item with pictures or links. This resulted in a dataset of 6022 unique news sharing Facebook-posts. This dataset, containing information on the post (e.g. sentiment, media criticism), the news article (e.g. outlet, topic), and the politician (e.g. party, function) will be analyzed to evaluate which of these factors affect user engagement (likes, comments and shares) with the post, and thus its reach through the politician in question. Building on previous research we expect the following findings: H1. User engagement is positively affected by a higher political function and a higher number of Facebook-followers. H2. User engagement is positively affected by the positive and negative sentiment of posts (compared to neutral posts). H3. User engagement is positively affected if the topic of the news article correlates with the politician’s issue ownership and issue specialization. References Hoffmann, C. P., Suphan, A., & Meckel, M. (2016). The impact of use motives on politicians’ social media adoption. Journal of Information Technology and Politics, 13(3), 239–256. Karlsen, R. (2015). Followers are opinion leaders: The role of people in the flow of political communication on and beyond social networking sites. European Journal of Communication, 30(3), 301–318. Katz, E., & Lazarsfeld, P. F. (1955). Personal influence: The part played by people in the flow of mass communications. Routledge. Vaccari, C., & Valeriani, A. (2015). Follow the leader! Direct and indirect flows of political communication during the 2013 Italian general election campaign. New Media & Society, 17(7), 1025–1042.