Political Interest Networks in Facebook Portugal

A collective FCT-funded research project aimed at characterizing the communicational activities of political actors on the social network platform Facebook during an 18-month period encompassing the 2019 electoral acts (for the European and for the National Parliament). With the help of the methodological tools of digital methods, netnography, content analysis and automated sentiment analysis, the driving research question for the project was: Considering Facebook as a platform that contemplates the expression and discussion of political views, how do Portuguese official and non-official actors use it for political participation, and how are followers engaged? One of the accomplished objectives was a global characterization – quantitative and  thematic – of the activities of official actors (here operationally defined as the Facebook pages of political parties with parliamentary representation), both from the supply (posting) and the demand (engagement) sides. The project, organized in small and specialized subteams, also contemplated more singular issues, such as hate speech on posts and on comments, the presence of specific themes, such as the environment and climate crisis, and the identification of non official pages and their activities. The main outputs consisted of peer reviewed papers, the participation in scientific meetings, and the organization of a closing conference with international experts on the subject of political communication on social media