Populism continues to gain traction in politics but there has been relatively little research on how it plays out on the Internet. The special issue at hand aims at narrowing this gap of research by focusing on the close relation between populism and online communication. This introduction presents an integrative definition of populism, as well as a theoretical analysis of the interplay between populist communication logic and online opportunity structures. The individual contributions discuss how populist actors may benefit from the Internet. They analyze how political leaders and extreme parties use populist online communication. The authors also shed light on how populist movements may relate to various political parties. They finally demonstrate which groups of social media users are more susceptible to populism than others and what effects populist online communication may have on citizens. We hope that this special issue will contribute to the discussion on what is arguably one of the largest political challenges currently faced by a series of nations around the globe.

News sharing across different social media platforms is increasingly impacting on our news habits. However, we know very little about what makes news popular in these settings. The current paper details what types of news stories are shared the most on two social media platforms—Facebook and Twitter. By conducting a qualitative content analysis and comparing data from four Norwegian media outlets, we find that editorial comment pieces about “softer” news topics are more frequently shared than “harder” news topics from all media outlets—except for TV2. For this latter broadcaster, the results suggest that sensational news and news regarding celebrities allows for viral effects to take place.

Social media are critical tools offering connections between political actors, voters, and journalists. However, existing scholarship rarely assesses how user engagement differs by platform, content, and function of the post. We examine Facebook (n = 938), Instagram (n = 258), and Twitter (n = 1771) posts by the leaders of three major political parties in Canada during the 2019 Federal Election. Across all three platforms, Liberal Leader Trudeau’s posts receive the most engagement. On Twitter, attack posts receive slightly more engagement and interaction posts receive less engagement, compared with other platforms. While policy posts produce lower levels of engagement across platforms, Facebook is distinctive in yielding the lowest levels of user engagement on policy posts. In sum, our findings suggest that political leaders should tailor the content of their social media posts to different platforms.

On Facebook, patterns of user engagement largely shape what types of political content citizens can see on the platform. Higher engagement leads to higher visibility. Therefore, one of the major goals of political actors’ Facebook communication is to produce content with the potential to provoke user engagement, and thereby increase their own visibility. This study introduces the concept of self-centered social media communication style which focuses on “salient” and “owned” issues with populist and negative appeals and investigates how user engagement is related to its main elements. We also explore how users’ receptivity to these content-related factors is shaped by country context. More specifically, we hypothesize that users are more likely to react, comment on and share posts focusing on salient topics or issues “owned” by parties rather than more permanent policy issues, and posts including populist appeals and negativity. Further, we test how these effects are moderated by geographical regions and the level of party system polarization. We manually coded 9,703 Facebook posts of 68 parties from 12 European countries in the context of the 2019 European elections. Our findings show that users are more likely to engage with immigration-related, domestic, populist and negative posts, but react less to posts dealing with environmental or economic issues. While issue ownership does not play a significant role for user engagement, country context plays a minor role. However, some populist appeals are more effective in more polarized countries.

Featuring a longitudinal, structural study of European party and citizen activity on Instagram between 2012 and 2018, this article outlines the overarching changes in the ways that Instagram has been employed for political party communication. Differentiating between populist and non-populist political parties, the results indicate that much like for other platforms such as Facebook, the former category of parties enjoy higher amounts of citizen engagement than their non-populist competitors. Detailing the uses of different types of posts by the two types of political actors, the study provides insights into how political parties have adopted and used Instagram from 2012 and onward.