Viral politics

This monograph seeks to answer the question of how political communication, and thus the way politics works, is changing, with Facebook playing an increasing role in the public sphere. The starting point of the writing is that this change is worth approaching from the point of view of the functioning of political communication as a whole, and this approach offers new conceptual and theoretical clues to interpret the role of Facebook in politics. This is because the ecosystem of political communication is being changed by the fact that communication between citizens is gaining strategic importance thanks to Facebook. In the past, political actors treated citizens primarily as recipients of communication. Meanwhile, they tried to influence the communication of professional media products in order for their messages to reach the electorate, and this resulted in the mediatization of politics. However, on Facebook, which is becoming increasingly important in political outreach, citizens ’social media activity plays a key role in spreading the message, and political actors are therefore increasingly seeking to respond to their communications in the form of likes, comments and shares. Thus, the approach to strategic communication is changing: it no longer wants to influence the thinking and influence of citizens, but also their online communication with their acquaintances. Similarly, they are no longer just trying to influence media communication, but also citizens. This phenomenon can be called its political viralization. The monograph empirically examines the operation of viral politics in the 2014 Hungarian parliamentary elections. It provides a detailed picture of how candidates running in individual constituencies communicated on Facebook, and then uses quantitative and qualitative tools to analyze what types of social media content have provoked citizen reactions and what content has become viral during the campaign. The article also examines how the viral performance on Facebook affected the election results of politicians.