Young, male, divisive issues: the social and political characteristics of French MPs that encourage audience engagement on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter
Résumé
This article analyses the use of Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter by French MPs during the 2022 presidential election, focusing on audience engagement based on social and political characteristics as well as post themes. Using a supervised machine learning method, we analysed posts (N = 35,348) published by 387 French MPs during this election. The results indicate that posts from younger and male MPs garner more reactions. MPs from large cities received higher engagement on Twitter, whereas Facebook and Instagram users reacted more to the content shared by MPs from rural areas. MPs from opposition parties elicit more reactions than those from the ruling party. This trend is particularly pronounced for MPs from parties at the extremes of the political spectrum, particularly far-right MPs, as their many messages on divisive issues are popular with social media users.
