House and Senate Democrats have gone on an anti-Trump rampage on Facebook, their attacks in posts jumping 450 percent after he was elected, according to a new and exhaustive review of congressional Facebook usage.
Virtually nonexistent before Trump’s election, the percentage of opposition postings by Democratic members surged and far out distanced the much lower percentage of Republican congressional rage against former President Obama during his last two years in office, according to the Pew Research Center.
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Pew charted the posts and found that during the Obama administration, Democrats didn’t criticize Republicans much on Facebook. About 6 percent of the posts were negative.
But that surged to 33 percent after Trump came to power, though it has dropped a bit to 24 percent.
According to Pew:
Following Trump’s inauguration, the share of Democratic legislators’ Facebook posts that included oppositional language – defined here as posts that oppose or disagree with the actions, decisions or positions of Trump and his administration or Republicans and conservatives – peaked in March 2017 at an average of 33% of all of their posts before ramping down to 24% toward the end of the year. That compares with an average of 12% of Republican lawmakers’ posts expressing opposition to Democrats and liberals or Obama during the last two years of his presidency. Democratic opposition during Obama’s presidency – at that point mostly aimed at congressional Republicans – appeared in just 6% of their Facebook posts.
The report shows how important Facebook has become in the political debate.
Since Trump entered the White House, Pew found that Democrats have been at war on Facebook. Their targets also include Congress.
“The analysis finds that Democrats expressed political opposition nearly five times as much under Trump as they did during the last two years of Barack Obama’s presidency. Much of this opposition was directed at President Trump, though Democrats also increasingly opposed Republican members of Congress,” said Pew.
Republicans, meanwhile, have come out in support for Trump more than twice as much than Democrats did for Obama.
And, said Pew, online followers like the attacks and engage more if elected officials took sides.
Notably, said Pew, posts opposing Hillary Rodham Clinton during the 2016 election “received 93 percent more likes on average – the largest increase in likes across all the kinds of posts examined here.”
