Post-Election: Facebook Reactions Analysis / Part 2

09.11.2017

In our final report on the Austrian Election Campaign 2017, we try to answer the question of whether and how the Silberstein revelations impacted user reactions on candidates' Facebook postings.

On October 3rd 2017, we published a preliminary report on users' reactions to frontrunners' Facebook postings during the latest Austrian election campaign (#nrw17). By "reactions", we mean the emoji-like icons resembling emotions. Facebook offers the reactions such as "Love", "Haha", "Wow", "Sad" and "Angry".

While we got a lot of positive feedback after publishing our preliminary result, the most common question, however, was: "What about Silberstein?" (i.e. the revelation that a former SPÖ consultant may have set up two Facebook groups that were publishing racist and anti-Semitic content in the aim of damaging the ÖVP and FPÖ campaign, which eventually got the SPÖ a lot of negative media coverage).

In this final post-election report/blog, we are thus interested in whether or not the Silberstein revelations impacted user reactions on candidates' Facebook pages. While answering this research question is difficult and proving a counterfactual (i.e. a "what if" scenario) is impossible, we take an explorative look at how user reactions changed over the course of the campaign, more specifically before and after September 30.

Enjoy reading our final report on Facebook reactions to candidates’ Facebook pages!

And feel free to send us your feedback!