Spanish Political Parties on Facebook: New Sources of Content for Political Journalism

Abstract

Political parties take advantage of the internet to disseminate their messages, particularly during election campaigns. In addition to the public, these messages reach journalists, who have turned these platforms into another tool for their professional work. The aim of this study is to reflect on how the nature of publications can affect the work of journalists who use this content as raw material to work with. In order to explore this more deeply, a quantitative approach is proposed, consisting of a metric analysis of 1,280 Facebook posts by 10 political forces and a survey of 1,004 people, representing the universe of the Spanish population. The results show that the parties disseminate unidirectional and propagandistic content on Facebook during campaigns, marginalising dialogue and interaction. This restricts journalists’ ability to converse with political parties through the social network, which at the same time is impacted by messages whose veracity is secondary to their objective of reaching as many internet users as possible.

Keywords

• social networks
• political parties
• electoral campaign
• political journalism
• political participation