Campaigning across platforms: how party status, social profiles, and emotional tone shaped user engagement with French MPs during the 2022 presidential election

This article examines audience engagement with posts published by 387 French MPs on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter during the 2022 presidential election (N = 35,348). Using a supervised machine learning method, we investigate how engagement varies according to MPs’ political affiliation, social characteristics, post topics, and emotional tone. The findings reveal that party status shapes online visibility: posts from opposition MPs, particularly those from radical parties, consistently elicit higher engagement than those from the governing party, which tends to favor neutral and coordination-oriented messaging. Social underrepresentation also plays a role: younger, rural, and female MPs generate more engagement in specific contexts, yet these effects vary substantially across platforms. For instance, women and urban MPs receive more reactions on Twitter, whereas Facebook and Instagram favor rural MPs. These platform-dependent patterns suggest that audience engagement is shaped not only by asymmetries in political status and social background, but also by platform-specific affordances: Facebook and Instagram tend to reward locally embedded and coordination-oriented communication, particularly among younger and rural MPs, while Twitter amplifies adversarial rhetoric and politically polarizing content, especially among urban or radical actors.