Radical populist parties receive greater audience support on social media: a cross-platform monitoring of digital campaigning for the 2024 European Parliament election

Abstract Social media platforms play an increasingly important role in political campaigning, enabling parties to bypass traditional media and mobilize support directly. While prior research highlights the online prominence of far-right and radical populist actors, most studies are limited to single platforms or national contexts. This study presents a cross-platform analysis of digital campaign communication by 401 parties across all 27 European Union member states during the 2024 European Parliament election. Using data from Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X/Twitter, and YouTube, we examine party activity and audience engagement via likes with parties’ posts as an indicator of support. By linking digital trace data with expert surveys, we test whether populist radical right parties disproportionately succeed in raising support online. Our findings confirm strong platform-specific advantages of radical populist parties, particularly on TikTok, YouTube and Facebook. We also observe high engagement for far-left populist parties with similar emotional and anti-elitist communication strategies. Based on the linked data, we find that the more Eurosceptic positions a party holds, and the more frequently expert data estimates them as using emotional appeals or anti-elitist communication, the more audience engagement they received across several platforms. Overall, the findings highlight a disproportionate online support for radical populist parties across the European Union.