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<p>This paper focuses on the communication of four Slovak political leaders about the European Union’s agenda on Facebook and their followers’ interactions. As cognitive authorities of their followers, politicians directly impact public perception of current news by providing their own opinions and views. The paper studies the politicians’ followers’ engagement through manual qualitative sentiment analysis. The results suggest that while moderate Facebook users who support the EU are not active and do not show their support openly, users who condemn the EU express their negative sentiments regardless of the politician’s sentiment in the post. If a politician praises the EU, the followers criticise it. If a politician criticises the EU, followers agree with them. That leads us to the conclusion that social media dynamised the concept of cognitive authority.</p>
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This paper focuses on the communication of four Slovak political leaders about the European Union’s agenda on Facebook and their followers’ interactions. As cognitive authorities of their followers, politicians directly impact public perception of current news by providing their own opinions and views. The paper studies the politicians’ followers’ engagement through manual qualitative sentiment analysis. The results suggest that while moderate Facebook users who support the EU are not active and do not show their support openly, users who condemn the EU express their negative sentiments regardless of the politician’s sentiment in the post. If a politician praises the EU, the followers criticise it. If a politician criticises the EU, followers agree with them. That leads us to the conclusion that social media dynamised the concept of cognitive authority.

Does hatred rule political communication on social media? How do politicians talk about the EU on Facebook, and how do their followers react?

Politics in Central Europe

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

This paper focuses on the communication of four Slovak political leaders about the European Union’s agenda on Facebook and their followers’ interactions. As...

Does hatred rule political communication on social media? How do politicians talk about the EU on Facebook, and how do their followers react?

Published Online: Mar 10, 2023

Page range: 477 - 498

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/pce-2022-0021

© 2022 Kristina Böhmer et al., published by Sciendo

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.