The Presidency and Social Media: Discourse, Disruption, and Digital Democracy in the 2016 Presidential Election by Daniel J. Schill & John Allen Hendricks

Author:Daniel J. Schill & John Allen Hendricks [Schill, Daniel J. & Hendricks, John Allen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138081536
Google: Og-hnQAACAAJ
Goodreads: 34498195
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-10-26T00:00:00+00:00

Discussion

During the surfacing phase of the campaign, the candidates’ top priorities are getting name recognition and fundraising. Twitter is one social media venue that allows candidates to put forth messages in a relatively less expensive outlet than television advertising. It has the limitation, however, of requiring users to pay attention to one’s Twitter feed. If one does not have followers, then the messages will not be seen. The candidates hope that members of the news media will pick up and disseminate the content and that followers will share the candidates’ messages through retweets, which will lead to further interest and expand the candidates’ networks. The candidate tweet frequencies demonstrate that social media use by candidates was prevalent, but there was variation across candidates as well. The top candidates in each party tweeted the most. Although frequent tweeting did not assure performance in the race, those candidates who did not tweet as often did not perform as well as their competitors.

The exploratory word analyses of the candidate tweets indicated that, across the board, regardless of party, candidates were using Twitter to share links to more elaborate forms of content, which was evident in the frequent appearance of the https and http words. All candidates had link sharing among their most frequent words. Retweeting signified by RT was on almost everyone’s initial top five list as well, save for a few candidates.

After excluding basic functions such as link sharing and retweeting from our analysis of frequently used words, the most prevalent theme that came across the Twitter feeds was self-references, as shown in Table 9.2. Only candidates Democrat Lincoln Chafee and Republican Bobby Jindal did not have self-references as at least one of their top five tweet words. It is worth noting that these candidates also did not do well in their respective races. This suggests that the self-promotion theme is a key part of successful surfacing phase candidacies.

In addition to wording, candidates make a series of decisions prior to publishing tweets. One important choice is how to draw in one’s audience. Several candidates attempted to inspire engagement by encouraging viewers to join them at various campaign events or watch them live (as evidenced by the frequent use of the words “join” and “live”). Retweeting was also a common occurrence. In addition to retweeting, Trump tried to engage potential voters by broadcasting their words (quoting them to all his followers), sometimes appending his own comments. In so doing, Trump capitalized on the interactive nature of social media. Rather than trot out a professionally created and focus group-tested message, he often simply repeated individuals who had tweeted positive messages about him. It is plausible that this implied to potential voters that Trump was both of the masses and had widespread support. Further research should test variations of tweets to explore the effects they may have.

The themes of change and experience are common in media discussions about the meaning of campaigns and candidacies. Based on retrospective voting, we expected that the party not in

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.