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Lookup NU author(s): Professor Karen RossORCiD
This is the authors' accepted manuscript of an article that has been published in its final definitive form by Sage Publications Ltd, 2020.
For re-use rights please refer to the publisher's terms and conditions.
Social media, particularly Twitter and Facebook, are increasingly entrenched in politicians’ election campaign activities. Yet even as social media become more ubiquitous, evidence suggests that these widely used platforms normalise rather than equalise the existing power dynamics of the political landscape. Our study of the 2017 general election in New Zealand uses a mixed-method approach which includes analysis of five Party Leader’s public Facebook wall posts, campaign coverage in two daily and two Sunday newspapers and interviews with Party workers and MPs. Our findings show that Party Leaders exhibit low levels of interactivity with citizens and mostly use posts to promote campaign information, that citizens are more likely to ‘like’ a post than to share or comment on it and that there was little consonance between politicians’ post content and mainstream news campaign coverage.
Author(s): Ross K, Fountaine S, Comrie M
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Media, Culture & Society
Year: 2020
Volume: 42
Issue: 7-8
Pages: 1260-1276
Print publication date: 01/10/2020
Online publication date: 27/02/2020
Acceptance date: 14/01/2020
Date deposited: 20/01/2020
ISSN (print): 0163-4437
ISSN (electronic): 1460-3675
Publisher: Sage Publications Ltd
URL: https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443720904583
DOI: 10.1177/0163443720904583
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