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Tweeting All the Way to the White House
Abstract
The election of Donald Trump and the great disruption in the news and social media.
Donald Trump's election as the 45th President of the United States came as something of a surprise—to many analysts, journalists, and voters. The New York Times's The Upshot gave Hillary Clinton an 85 percent chance of winning the White House even as the returns began to come in. What happened? And what role did the news and social media play in the election? In Trump and the Media, journalism and technology experts grapple with these questions in a series of short, thought-provoking essays. Considering the disruption of the media landscape, the disconnect between many voters and the established news outlets, the emergence of fake news and “alternative facts,” and Trump's own use of social media, these essays provide a window onto broader transformations in the relationship between information and politics in the twenty-first century.
The contributors find historical roots to current events in Cold War notions of "us" versus "them," trace the genealogy of the assault on facts, and chart the collapse of traditional news gatekeepers. They consider such topics as Trump's tweets (diagnosed by one writer as “Twitterosis”) and the constant media exposure given to Trump during the campaign. They propose photojournalists as visual fact checkers (“lessons of the paparazzi”) and debate whether Trump's administration is authoritarian or just authoritarian-like. Finally, they consider future strategies for the news and social media to improve the quality of democratic life.
Contributors Mike Ananny, Chris W. Anderson, Rodney Benson, Pablo J. Boczkowski, danah boyd, Robyn Caplan, Michael X. Delli Carpini, Josh Cowls, Susan J. Douglas, Keith N. Hampton, Dave Karpf, Daniel Kreiss, Seth C. Lewis, Zoey Lichtenheld, Andrew L. Mendelson, Gina Neff, Zizi Papacharissi, Katy E. Pearce, Victor Pickard, Sue Robinson, Adrienne Russell, Ralph Schroeder, Michael Schudson, Julia Sonnevend, Keren Tenenboim-Weinblatt, Tina Tucker, Fred Turner, Nikki Usher, Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, Silvio Waisbord, Barbie Zelizer
... Therefore, they construct their ways of surpassing intermediaries and communicating directly with 'the people' (Schmitter, 2006), and creating a logic of us and them (Waisbord, 2014). Along this vein, Cowls and Schroeder (2018) have recently argued that Trump's populism has benefited in this sense from the use of Twitter (Cowls and Schroeder, 2018), a point also underscored by Turner (2018). In her analysis of the emotionality of Trump's rhetoric, Wahl-Jorgensen (2018b) argues that he has 'ushered an emotional regime of anger' (p. ...
... Therefore, they construct their ways of surpassing intermediaries and communicating directly with 'the people' (Schmitter, 2006), and creating a logic of us and them (Waisbord, 2014). Along this vein, Cowls and Schroeder (2018) have recently argued that Trump's populism has benefited in this sense from the use of Twitter (Cowls and Schroeder, 2018), a point also underscored by Turner (2018). In her analysis of the emotionality of Trump's rhetoric, Wahl-Jorgensen (2018b) argues that he has 'ushered an emotional regime of anger' (p. ...
The emotional experience of consuming news about politics has been traditionally understudied. We aim to contribute to filling this void through a study of the emotional responses related to encountering stories about a high-profile political topic: the first 10 months of the administration of the US President, Donald Trump. To understand this, we draw upon 71 semi-structured interviews conducted in the greater metropolitan areas of Chicago, Miami and Philadelphia between January and October 2017. Our analysis indicates that: talking about political news often was a synonym of talking about President Trump; people expressed a high level of emotionality when recalling these experiences, which were more intense on social media and among those for whom the news felt more personal; feelings of anger or distress were often tied to wanting to increase political engagement; and individuals frequently develop mechanisms to cope with high levels of emotionality.
... He used Twitter to post outrageous claims about minorities, his political opponents, and the media, breaking with the established norms of electoral competition. News editors in earlier times might have rejected covering Trump's violations of norms; but in the new competitive environment of online media, Trump and his streams of offense guaranteed high viewership and readership numbers that proved irresistible to journalists (Cowls & Schroeder, 2018). ...
There has been a recent surge of political actors and groups challenging the legitimacy of established political institutions and mass media. We argue that this wave is no accident; rather, it is driven by digital media. Digital media allow outside challengers to route around social institutions that structure political discourse, such as parties and legacy media, which have previously held a monopoly on political coordination and information distribution. Digital media have weakened the power of these institutions, allowing outsiders to maintain extreme positions that formerly would have been filtered out or suppressed by institutions structuring political discourse. In this article, we explicate mechanisms linking digital media to the rise of outsiders by discussing the successes of a diverse set of challengers fighting for attention and representation in the different political contexts of the United States, Germany, and China. We thus provide a novel explanation that systematically accounts for the political consequences of digital media.
Social media platforms have played a significant role in recent elections in the U.S. and other democracies. While Facebook and Twitter (now renamed X) claimed that they are “on a journey to connect the world,” to serve the goals of reforms and to bring about more democracy, their platforms have been effectively used to spread lies, misinformation, and disinformation which led some analysts to argue that we now live in a post-truth world and that the Orwellian dystopia is upon us. This paper is an attempt to assess whether big tech companies have created an Orwellian state in the U.S. We argue that the idiom of the Orwellian dystopia has been misused by scholars, commentators, and politicians on the political left as well as the political right. Our analysis of social media, especially Facebook, shows that the social media companies are not intentionally trying to subvert American democracy. Instead, as a business, they are driven by a profit motive and the logic of “surveillance capitalism.” Keywords: Cambridge Analytica, Facebook, micro targeting, Orwellian dystopia, post truth
Die Wahl Donald Trumps zum 45. Präsidenten der USA hat weite Teile der politischen Öffentlichkeit in eine Art Schockzustand versetzt. Nicht nur hatte kaum jemand ernsthaft damit gerechnet, dass sich der populistische Immobilienmogul und TV-Entertainer gegen eine versierte Politikerin wie Hillary Clinton durchsetzen würde; auch scheint sich seit der Wahl zu zeigen, dass es die Trump-Regierung ‚ernst meint‘, d. h. noch rücksichtsloser mit der politischen Opposition und kritischen Medien, staatlichen Institutionen und der Justiz, internationalen Abkommen und Allianzen sowie den allgemeinen Gepflogenheiten, Normen und Traditionen des politischen Geschäfts verfährt, als man dies ohnehin befürchtet hatte. Ziel dieses Aufsatzes ist es, den kollektiven Schockzustand mit Blick auf seine beiden Seiten zu analysieren: einerseits hinsichtlich der von Trump betriebenen Politik der Störung und des Schocks, ihrer Techniken und Taktiken, Voraussetzungen und Verfahrensweisen; andererseits aber auch mit Blick auf die geschockte (liberale) Öffentlichkeit und dasjenige, was sich in loser Anlehnung an Wolfgang Hagen als ihre ‚Gegenwartsvergessenheit‘ bezeichnen lässt. Wenn Trump im Folgenden als Symptom begriffen werden soll, dann ist es notwendig, über die Person Trump hinauszugehen und die ökonomischen, politischen, kulturellen, medialen und ideologisch-affektiven Bedingungen und Transformationen in den Blick zu nehmen, die seinen Aufstieg überhaupt erst ermöglicht haben.
Data-driven campaigning has been in the spotlight over several years. Yet, we still have a limited understanding of political data analytics companies: how they envision data analytics and voter targeting, their role in electoral processes and what promises they make to their clients. This article focuses on the way in which such issues are conceived of in the marketing rhetoric of the political data analytics industry. Drawing on a sample of 19 political data analytics companies it systematically explores the ways in which data analytics is envisioned and marketed as a powerful tool in electoral processes, exposing a fundamental disconnect between scholarly discourse on the one hand – often critical of the claims of these companies about the efficacy of their methods – and a highly functionary data imaginary on the other hand, actively fostered by the political data-analytics industry and the media.
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