Angry Posts Go Viral: The Negativity Bias In The Online Communication Of Western European Rightwing Populist Leaders

The recent rise of right-wing populist formations in Western Europe has often been seen as deriving from the way they have managed to exploit social media affordances to gather supporters and channel anger. However, to date, these assertions have been mostly impressionistic and unsystematic. In this article we develop a comparative analysis of how right-wing populists increase their engagement on Facebook by playing on users’ emotions. Looking at the Facebook posts of Matteo Salvini in Italy, Marine Le Pen in France, Santiago Abascal in Spain and Alice Weidel in Germany, and comparing them to those of their most notable national opponents, we provide evidence that an angerfocused rhetoric is fuelling online mobilisation especially for the populist right. To this end, we adopt a mixed methods approach by using quantitative analysis of Facebook metrics, informed by a qualitative investigation of the communicative strategies. We use the ‘Angry Reaction’ as a reflection of the users’ anger towards the content of the post. We see that anger is particularly prominent when the topic of discussion is migration; we also find that anger has a high correlation to user engagement (namely sharing). Our findings point to a “negativity bias” content - one that collects more Angry Reactions and is hence likelier to capture attention and acquire visibility. They also raise important questions for both political science and new media studies research and call for a more in-depth understanding of processes of political communication on social media