The Social Media Paradox: How Political Public Relations are Hard to Practice on Facebook

Alda Magalhães Telles, Ilo Alexandre and Jorge Martins Rosa

OSF Preprints, Jan 2024. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/btw6u.

There is widespread acknowledgement that social media platforms are strategically used by organizations to communicate and even engage with their stakeholders. It is also recognized in political communication studies that social networks can promote interaction between political actors and citizens, encouraging participation and direct communication. Introducing the dialogic communication principles into the analysis of political parties’ interactive behavior on social networks, this paper analyzes the level of interactivity between the public and the political parties that participated in the 2019 general elections in Portugal as they occurred on their institutional Facebook pages during the election campaign.

The findings of the analysis, carried out based on an original set of metrics, conclude that the level of engagement and interactivity of political parties with their followers on Facebook is low or even null. This result is consistent with our first hypothesis of the existence of the so-called “social media paradox”, mirroring the interaction challenges and limitations in online political communication. Our second hypothesis, that the new or fringe parties show a higher level of interactivity with their Facebook followers, was confirmed. Another important finding of this study deepens the “paradoxical” behavior online: while social networking is mainly oriented to public engagement, political parties privilege the private communication options of Facebook that tend to favor a more deep and real dialogic exchange between political parties and citizens.