The rise of new populist actors and consolidation of the use of social media such as Twitter are changing the political communication field. The main goal of this research is to understand whether European populist political actors introduce 2 of the inherent elements of populism—the people and the elite—into their digital communicative strategy and how they frame it. The samples are composed by the messages shared on Twitter by 4 European political parties (Podemos, Movimento 5 Stelle, Front National, and UKIP) and their leaders. This study analyzed 9,128 messages. The results show that despite being an intrinsic characteristic of populism, these political actors practically never appeal to the people in their messages, but criticize the elites. It therefore produces an illustrated populism in their social media strategy, in which everything is for the people, but without the people.

Abstract

Public concern over misinformation has reached worrying levels in recent years. This phenomenon stimulates a climate of information uncertainty under which individuals may also question high-quality information that is needed to sustain meaningful political debates. To address this issue, this panel study investigates antecedents of perceived misinformation exposure on social media and its consequences for media trust. We take a novel approach by examining 3 key factors that might lead to heightened perceived misinformation exposure (PME) among social media users: (1) their political knowledge, (2) their partisan strength, and (3) network characteristics. Even more importantly, we find that PME decreases media trust, and that this effect was especially pronounced among individuals with low political knowledge.