Cross-platform political communication

A comparative analysis of social media campaigning by Italian populist radical right leaders

Abstract

Research shows that social media favors personalized, intimate, and emotional political communication and underlines the elective affinity between social media and populist leaders. However, cross-platform research on political communication is still rare. Existing studies focus on three aspects: how party strategists or politicians assess the relative importance of different social media platforms based on their affordances, the parties’ and politicians’ different investments in the various platforms and audience engagement, and message-tailoring on specific social media platforms. In this paper, we aim to compare the political communication of two right-wing populist party leaders in Italy—Giorgia Meloni (FdI) and Matteo Salvini (Lega)—between 2021 and 2022 on three social media platforms: Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. The analysis focuses on time, content, and similarity. The results of the cross-platform analysis confirm the evidence of a permanent campaign mode of the two leaders and point to four main results: a cross-platform similarity in communication, a difference in audience engagement, the relevance of depoliticized political communication, and a higher audience engagement when communication focuses on positive rather than aggressive content. These findings significantly impact our understanding of political communication in the digital age.