It glitters, but is it gold? Negative campaigning on social media in Portugal

In the era of dissonant public spheres, negative campaigning on social media is an increasingly relevant topic. This study enhances the understanding of negative campaigning in the Portuguese political communication context by introducing three advancements: (1) an assessment of which factors influence the use of negative campaigning by political parties on social media; (2) a more detailed characterization of the attacks and their targets; and (3) its impact on the public. To achieve this, we conducted a quantitative content analysis of all the posts by Portuguese political parties on Facebook during the 2022 National Election ( n = 1384). Our findings suggest that negative campaigning has increased in Portugal over the last decade. Attacks came mostly from challengers, more extreme and better-resourced parties; they were predominantly based on economic matters and mainly issued through audiovisual formats. The key targets were parties, especially the established ones, who faced both issue-based and trait-based attacks throughout the electoral month. Furthermore, users seem receptive to negativity, as negative campaigning posts performed better across nearly all engagement metrics. The implications of these results are further discussed.