A Pause in the Mockery: Government, Party and Politician Pages on Facebook in Britain's First Covid-19 Wave
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: When a crisis strikes, does political attention turn from parties to government? I test this on Facebook in Britain using 274,047 posts from 437 political pages tracked by CrowdTangle between June 2018 and October 2020: government and Parliament pages, party pages and politicians' pages. Before the pandemic, government pages drew 5% of the interactions on government, party and politicians' pages combined. In the first wave of Covid-19, from mid-March to the end of May 2020, they drew 29%. Weekly interactions with government pages rose about twelvefold, from a threefold rise in posting and a three- to fourfold rise in engagement per post. Engagement with party pages showed no clear jump, and the typical party or politician's post drew less engagement than before. The attention faded at about 5% a week. The tone changed too, but not as one might expect. The government's main Facebook page was normally a target of mockery and anger: in 2018 and 2019, laughing and angry reactions were more common on it than love. During the "stay home" weeks both almost disappeared. They returned from the week of 11 May 2020, when the government's advice changed to "stay alert", before the Dominic Cummings story. By the summer laughter was back near its usual level, though anger stayed below its 2018–19 level. On Facebook the rally round the government showed up as a surge of attention to the state and a two-month pause in the usual mockery of it. Provenance and AI use. The data were exported from CrowdTangle in October 2020 for my doctoral research. This paper builds on my doctoral thesis (Hotham 2021, University of Bath). The analysis and writing were completed in 2026. I designed the study and am responsible for the analysis and conclusions. I wrote the text, with drafting and editing assistance from Claude (Anthropic), which also helped prepare the analysis code. I reviewed and checked all text and results. Version 2 added this statement to the paper, and version 3 changes only the date on the title page; the findings are unchanged. Data note (added October 2026). These data can no longer be collected. CrowdTangle, Meta's tool for public Facebook content, closed on 14 August 2024, and its successor, the Meta Content Library, is open only to approved researchers and does not offer the same ready-made page-level histories. The posts analysed here were exported in October 2020, so they are a record that cannot now be rebuilt. This note was added to the record; the PDF is unchanged.
Author: Hotham, Tristan
Language: English
Topic: Social Media and Politics
Subfield: Communication
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7221465520