From the Doorstep to the Debate: Momentum's Facebook Page in the 2017 General Election and the 2018 Permanent Campaign

Satellite campaigns, organisations that campaign for a party without being part of it, are now a familiar part of British elections. We know less about what they do between elections. I compare the Facebook page of Momentum, the campaign group formed to support Jeremy Corbyn's leadership of the Labour Party, in the month before the 2017 general election (153 posts) with a random sample of its posts from 2018 (120 posts), and set the 2017 posts against Labour's own party and leader pages (422 posts). All posts were hand coded. In 2017 Momentum did a different job from Labour's pages. The party and leader pages asked people to vote (85% and 59% of posts), made pledges and used the party slogan. Momentum asked people to help on the doorstep (48% of posts), volunteer (49%) and sign up to campaign (47%), against 3% to 7% on Labour's pages, and used humour, memes and screenshots of tweets. In 2018 the page changed. Requests to help on the doorstep, volunteer or sign up fell to 6% to 8% of posts. Posts that were mainly negative rose from 28% to 55%, criticism of mainstream media from 14% to 38%, of newspapers from 1% to 20% and of opposition MPs from 5% to 22%. The page praised party members more, asked people to join the party more often (2% to 16%), and used less humour and fewer memes. Between elections, Momentum's page moved from organising campaigners to arguing about politics and the media on behalf of its side. The record includes counts of posts carrying each code. The posts themselves are not shared, in line with the terms under which they were collected.