#Kreiss D. & McGregor S. C. (2018). Technology firms shape political communication: The work of Microsoft Facebook Twitter and Google with ca

[leoli]

When a president falls in love with social media

A famous person is ridiculed and sarcastic in news reports, and many authoritative media call him a “clown”. These news reports about trump, some are entertainment news, some are political news, some are positive reports, some are negative reports. Given the results of the vote, maybe a lot of coverage of him was one of the key factors in his victory. As for the positive reports or negative reports, they have played a role in helping.These news reports about trump, some are entertainment news, some are political news, some are positive reports, some are negative reports. Given the results of the vote, maybe a lot of coverage of him was one of the key factors in his victory. As for the positive reports or negative reports, they have played a role in helping. 

One question, how did he get such high media exposure?

One of the answers is that Trump and his team are proficient in the mixed activities of traditional media and digital media. It will help him gain a favorable position in the constituency (Wells, Shah, Pevehouse, Yang … and Schmidt, 2016) Through social media, Trump spent so little money in the first three months of his campaign, but he was easily and firmly at the top of the Republican primary. He relied on a successful twitter strategy to succeed. There is no doubt that social media played a very important role in that period. In United States, the trump campaign has brought together extraordinary forces from companies like Microsoft, Facebook, Google and twitter. The purpose is obvious, expanding his influence in the election campaign. At the same time, companies such as Microsoft, Facebook, Google and twitter are also actively seeking political business to generate revenue (Kreiss and McGregor, 2018).

He only had 4.4 million twitter followers in October 2015 and he can be "mentioned" 6.3 million times in two months. Trump's success in twitter is largely due to his media team and he has often used the talent and expertise of companies like Facebook, twitter and Google (Kreiss and McGregor, 2018). The result of this is that he was been talked about endlessly on twitter.

However, after 2016 US presidential election, more attention has been paid to the issue of fake news. Coincidentally, what the president often does and excels at is making and spreading fake news. According to a survey: 1)62 percent of us adults get news on social media (Gottfried and Shearer, 2016); 2) The most popular fake news story was more popular than the mainstream news stories (Silverman, 2016). The combination of these evidences, some commentators believe that Trump was elected president in part because of the wide spread of these fake news (Allcott and Gentzkow, 2017).

Four years later during COVID-19 spread period, Trump and his team in social media is still active. However, Fake news can't help him win the presidential election again, meanwhile Trump's strange remarks in the media did not solve the problem of the epidemic. A national survey shows the attitude of the American people to the epidemic (Jamieson and Albarracín, 2020): 1) The CDC exaggerated the danger posed by the virus to hurt President Trump (19% saying probably or definitely true); 2) the US government created the virus (10%); and 3) the Chinese government created the virus (23%). By inference, social media (e.g., Facebook) and traditional media (e.g., Fox News) coverage had an impact on people's beliefs (Romer and Jamieson, 2020). These beliefs are negative from all angles. Trump's speech on these media platforms did not bring positive effects to the epidemic prevention and control. Sadly, the spread of these fake news leads to the uncontrollable epidemic situation and puts more lives in danger. 

[oliviablog119]

Social media technology and the rise of Trump

Trump has a title in China called ‘Twitter ruler’, which comes from his frequent statements on Twitter, a social media outlet. Not only is it usual, but his 2016 election victory was inextricably linked to his use of social media. In an interview with CBS's ‘60 Minutes’ on 13 November of the same year, Trump admitted that social media was a key element in helping him win the election.

https://www.vox.com/2016/5/16/11603854/donald-trump-twitter

Unlike traditional media such as television and newspapers, social media breaks the one-to-many communication method, allowing candidates to talk directly to the public, increasing interactivity, making the public feel more engaged, and spreading more quickly and widely. Instead of simply receiving information, as traditional media do, social media users actively create and retweet. For politicians, social media has disrupted the previous model of campaigning (Lapowsky, 2016). Whereas in the past candidates had to use traditional media channels such as television, newspapers, and radio to make their executive campaigns to the public, social media now breaks this one-way model. Through social media, candidates post their political views, share their daily routines, and express their opinions and attitudes on a certain issue, which is a self-image building process, thus bringing them closer to the public and giving them a pro-people feel. At the same time, the candidate can interact with the public and thus can be informed of the public's attitude more quickly.

It is no coincidence that Trump is not the first person to use the internet for political propaganda. As early as 1996, the US Republican candidate Buchanan started using his personal website to a campaign, and in 2008 Obama's use of social media in the election increased its influence. Since then, four companies - Twitter, Facebook, Microsoft, and Google - have created organisational structures that match the partisan nature of their campaign staffing and consulting (Kreiss and Mcgregor, 2017). It is with the existence of these organisations that a very significant problem is that the public has no way of knowing whether the tweets they see are from the organisations or from the campaigners themselves. (Adams and McCorkindale, 2013)

Trump is smart in that he knows that creating a pro-people image will not make him stand out among the contenders; it is enough to have traffic that generates conversation and attention. While presidential campaigns typically use traditional media, speaking tours, and social media to gain attention and votes, Trump has gone the other way and maximised the role of social media. Social media is being used by Trump as a platform to control the message and traditional media is being agenda-set. It is clear that political communication has demonstrated the attributes of marketing. The difference between Trump and other campaigners can also be seen in his texts on social media platforms, Crockett (Pain and Chen, 2019) notes that Trump's tweets are most often ‘great’ ‘bad’ ‘amazing’ as well as exclamation marks, which are very noticeable. Such colloquial expressions occur almost exclusively when interacting with people face-to-face, and his use of words is often easy to understand, which invariably increases the number of readers again.

On social media platforms, highly controversial topics and fragmented text are more appealing to the eye. So, from the start of the primaries, Trump has used social media such as Twitter to post vulgar, provocative, racist, or unsubstantiated speculation.

A new survey by the Pew Research Center shows that about 70% of American adults say they get their news through social media (Sshearer and Matsa, 2018). Perhaps the era of new media politics has been here since Barack Obama was dubbed the ‘Internet President’, and social media has won over politicians from traditional media. The future of presidential campaigning is inevitably going to be a social media campaign.

https://www.vox.com/2016/5/16/11603854/donald-trump-twitter

https://www.journalism.org/2018/09/10/news-use-across-social-media-platforms-2018/

References：

Adams, A., and McCorkindale, T. (2013). Dialogue and transparency: A content analysis of how the 2012 presidential candidates used Twitter. Public Relations Review, pp. 357–359.

 Crockett, Z. (2016). What I learned analyzing 7 months of Donald Trump’s tweets. Vox.com. Retrieved 12 December, 2020 from http://www.vox.om/2016/5/16/11603854/donald-trump-Twitter

 Kreiss, D., and Mcgregor, S. C. (2017). Technology firms shape political communication: The work of Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, and Google with campaigns during the 2016 U.S. presidential cycle. Political Communication. DOI:10.1080/10 584609.2017.1364814

 Lapowsky, I. (2016). Here’s how Facebook actually won Trump the presidency. wired.com. Retrieved 12 December, 2020 from from https://www.wired.com/2016/11/facebook-won-trump-election-not-just-fake-news/ [Google Scholar]

Pain, P., Chen, G. M., (2019) The President Is in: Public Opinion and

the Presidential Use of Twitter. Social Media + Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051198551

 Sshearer, E., and Matsa, K. E., (2018) News Use Across Social Media Platforms 2018. Retrieved 12 December, 2020 from https://www.journalism.org/2018/09/10/news-use-across-social-media-platforms-2018/