Controlling the Message: New Media in American Political Campaigns by Victoria A. Farrar-Myers & Justin S. Vaughn

Author:Victoria A. Farrar-Myers & Justin S. Vaughn [Farrar-Myers, Victoria A. & Vaughn, Justin S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Political Ideologies, Democracy, Political Process, General, Psychology, Psychopathology, Dissociative Identity Disorder, Social Science, Media Studies
ISBN: 9781479867592
Google: CZaIBwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 24498747
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2015-03-27T07:45:30+00:00

Part 3

Social Media’s Impact on Campaign Politics

8

The Influence of User-Controlled Messages on Candidate Evaluations

JOSHUA HAWTHORNE AND BENJAMIN R. WARNER

The rise of social media as a potent political force in campaign politics played a major role in journalistic analyses of the 2012 presidential election. Traditional media lavished attention on the content of political discussions on social media platforms (Fouhy 2011; Sloan 2012), the influence of social media on electoral outcomes (Parker 2012), and the predictive power of social media trends on election results (“Did Social Media Predict the 2012 Presidential Election Results?” 2012). Driving this coverage was the fact that social media were more widely used during the 2012 election than at any previous time. For example, a picture of President Barack Obama hugging his wife, Michelle Obama, which was posted to commemorate his victory, became the most “liked” Facebook post ever (Willis 2012) and the most retweeted photo of all time (Parker 2012). Election night was the most live-tweeted event in U.S. history when considering the number of tweets posted (“Election Night 2012” 2012), closely followed by the first presidential debate (“Dispatch from the Denver Debate” 2012). Researchers at the Pew Internet and American Life Project determined that 39% of American adults used social media for political purposes during the 2012 election (Ranie et al. 2012). Given the wide use of social media in the 2012 election, no analysis of campaign messaging would be complete without examining the implications of these new communication platforms.

The wide use of social media in the 2012 campaign is significant because, perhaps more than any other technological innovation in electoral politics, Facebook and Twitter allow the user to control the message. Facebook users are not only authors of their own political content when they post status updates and comment on the updates of their friends; they are also gatekeepers of information when they manage their friend lists, hide posts from their feed, and distribute links to articles and videos to their own friends. Similarly, Twitter allows users to be the authors of their own brief messages, to distribute links to other campaign messages, and to select the sources they would like to receive information from in their own Twitter stream. Relative to other (especially traditional) modes of campaign communication, these social media platforms provide the greatest amount of control to individual users.

Though individual users in social media environments dominate message control, research has yet to demonstrate what effect, if any, social media communication has on attitudes toward candidates. More specifically, does social media communication influence how candidates are perceived? This is the central question addressed by the research presented here. In this chapter, we evaluate the relationship between social media communication about specific political events and perception of candidates by conducting two case studies from the 2012 election: one examining social media communication about the first presidential debate and one examining Governor Mitt Romney’s leaked comments about the 47% of Americans whom he identified as not paying income tax.

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