Uses of Social Media Platforms by Norwegian Political Parties in the 2021 Election

The final presenter in this session at the ICA 2024 conference is the excellent Hedwig Tønnesen, whose interest is in the strategies of political actors on three social media platforms. Social media are now widely used by such actors, of course, but have not necessarily delivered the wider democratic potential that some had seen in them; more often, they are simply used by parties to create engagement and mobilisation, or disseminate information and political advertising. This also generates visibility and amplification for their content, as well as engagement metrics for the political actors themselves.

Such uses are also constrained by the specific campaign environments, and the present study focusses especially on Norway – where campaigning follows a Western European style, is party-centric, publicly financed, and professionalised, operates within a stable, hybrid and digital mainstream media landscape, and uses platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. The present study focussed on the 2021 Norwegian election.

Key practices here might include information and calls to interaction, and referrals to further information elsewhere through outlinking features; mobilising calls to action; and interaction calls to action (which are generally less common, however). These are likely to be unevenly distributed across the different platforms, however – if parties have the ability and resources to diversify their communication strategies.

The study examined some 3,000 posts from the nine largest Norwegian parties’ accounts on these platforms. Facebook was most preferred for information purposes; Instagram for mobilisation; interaction took place across all platforms; Twitter was not the preferred platform for any practice, perhaps because it is (or was) a very elite-oriented platform in Norway. Facebook pushed links to Websites and videos; Twitter links to news media. Instagram and Facebook pushed mobilisation posts. Facebook and Instagram pushed some calls to interaction, but these were very sparse (below 7% of all posts, on both platforms).

This shows a great deal of conservatism in social media campaigning in Norway: no particular innovations to tried and true campaigning approaches have appeared here – it remains to be seen whether this is unique, or similar across other countries where these platforms are used in electoral campaigning.