Revealed: what the Scottish and Welsh election candidates talked about on social media

The economy dominated the conversation while national concerns like immigration and crime hardly featured, according to a Full Fact analysis of the social media posts from election candidates in Scotland and Wales.

To get a sense of what the candidates were talking about, Full Fact collected 33,294 posts that they published on Facebook and X between 15 April and 4 May. We then analysed—with the help of AI—the 19,126 posts representing the main parties in each nation.

This snapshot of their online activity reveals some things you might expect to find: it was posts from the Greens that were most likely to mention the environment in both countries; independence was a much bigger issue in Scotland than in Wales.

But we also found some things that might be less obvious: for example, in Scotland it was Reform UK candidates who talked about the environment more often than anyone apart from the Greens, while in Wales the Liberal Democrats were much more likely than other parties to talk about foreign affairs.

The big picture

Data gathered by Democracy Club lists 685 different people who stood for election to the Scottish Parliament this year, and 675 for the Welsh Senedd.

Not all of them have X or Facebook accounts, however. And not all of those who do are regular users. Meanwhile, some are represented by the accounts of local parties who post on behalf of several candidates.

Our data therefore looks at a large sample of the candidates and parties who were active on these two social media platforms during the later part of the campaigning period.

One of the first things we noticed is that many social media posts just describe the candidates’ campaign activity—things like door-knocking and attending political events—without necessarily mentioning any areas of policy. Many more were reposts or replies where the topic wasn’t clear. Others posted about something too specific to belong in a wider category. Welsh candidates for both Labour and Plaid Cymru posted on Facebook about the importance of neutering cats, for example.

For about half the posts, therefore, the AI model we used didn’t attach any of the category labels we had defined. (You can see full details of the methodology we used below.)

We also noticed that although about 83% of the accounts we monitored represented the six main parties, some of the minor parties and independents were much more active on social media, making up 43% of all the posts we captured. Since some of these candidates posted about a small number of specific issues, we excluded them from the main analysis.

As you can see from the chart above, the economy, independence and health were the major policy topics in Scotland, as the economy and health were in Wales.

Education, transport and the environment were the next biggest topics in both countries, while there was strikingly little discussion of crime, immigration, foreign affairs and housing, on the whole. (A reminder that the devolved governments don’t have powers over some of the topics being debated nationally.)

How the parties differed

Once you discount the posts unrelated to our policy topics, the economy loomed large for candidates in all the main parties in both countries. In fact, no party talked more about any other subject, with the exception of the Lib Dems in Wales (health).

That aside, it’s striking how the SNP posted about independence much more than the other parties in Scotland, whereas Plaid Cymru actually posted about it less often than the Conservatives or Lib Dems in Wales.

Health and the environment (a category that includes posts about energy policy) were big topics for most parties in both countries. It is worth remembering here that our AI model only categorised what a post “is about” or “discusses”, which means a candidate could be expressing any opinion on the subject.

So whereas this Green post calls for a “fairer, greener and more equal future” in Scotland and this Reform post criticises renewable energy projects in Wales, both are posts about the environment.

Some specific areas of interest are what you might expect—like the Green focus on the environment, or the Reform focus on immigration. Others are less obvious. In Wales, the Lib Dems talked far more than the other parties about international matters, as did the Greens about housing.

In Scotland, transport seems to be a much more salient subject than it is in Wales, especially for the Lib Dems, SNP and Greens.

A collection of 19,126 social media posts by the six main parties is too large to summarise in general. Between them, they contain 873,648 words, which is the equivalent of about 11 books. But you can get a flavour, by looking at the most common words used by the main parties in Scotland and Wales.