MPs on Facebook

Abstract

Social media platforms are today the main spheres in which politicians make political and personal statements, confront other public figures, and interact with the public. In the current study, the Facebook pages of all Israeli Members of Parliament (MPs) were scraped and analyzed for the entire period of the 19th Israeli parliament service (between 2013 and 2015), in order to find similarities and differences between the posting behavior and acceptance of coalition and opposition members posts. We found that popular posts published by members of coalition and opposition differ in terms of scope of publication, scope of user engagement (posts by coalition members were more engaged with), content, and format (posts by members of opposition more varied in format, more mobilizing, critical, opinionative and negative, less formal but also less personal). The implications for the character of Facebook as a key parliamentary discursive arena are discussed.