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World Leaders a-Twitter: Communication Platforms and Agenda-Building During the 2018 NATO Summit Katja C. Walton International Affairs Program University of Colorado Boulder Defended April 2, 2019 Honors Thesis Defense Committee Dr. Janet Lynn Donavan, Primary Advisor Department of Political Science Dr. Douglas Snyder, Honors Council Representative International Affairs Program Dr. Levente Szentkirályi, Thesis Committee Member Program for Writing and Rhetoric World Leaders a - T w i t t e r | 2 Abstract: Twitter is a thriving microblogging service with growing prominence in the political sphere. In this study, I examine the differences between Twitter communications and verbal communications by three heads of state and government in relation to the most recent NATO Summit in July 2018. Through a three-step analysis, including descriptive statistics, content and tone analysis, and comparative analysis, the study investigates Twitter’s influence on content and tone and its agenda-building capacity for face-to-face summits. After hand-coding over 2,000 tweets and 15 verbal communications, I find that Twitter does not support more negative content and tone among world leaders than verbal communication. Rather, a leader’s tone remains consistent on both communication platforms, suggesting the salience of personality and political strategy as well as the importance of anonymity in online behavioral disinhibition. Findings also demonstrate that, in the case of Burden-Sharing negotiations during the 2018 NATO Summit, U.S. President Trump successfully implemented Twitter as an agenda-building tool to position Burden-Sharing as a prominent Summit topic. Ultimately, I conclude that the rejection of the platform’s legitimacy for diplomatic exchanges and the lack of direct discussion between politicians on Twitter demonstrates that Twitter is not a viable replacement for face-to-face summits. World Leaders a - T w i t t e r | 3 Table of Contents Introduction....................................................................................................................................4 Background.....................................................................................................................................8 Twitter………………………………………………………………………………………………………….………………..8 The North Atlantic Treaty Organization……………………………………………………..………………….10 Literature Review..........................................................................................................................12 Theory & Guiding Hypotheses.......................................................................................................20 Data & Methodology.....................................................................................................................22 Descriptive Statistics.....................................................................................................................30 Twitter Summary Statistics……………………………………………………………………………..….…………30 Verbal Communication Summary Statistics……………………………………………………..…….……..33 Content and Tone Analysis............................................................................................................34 Content and Tone on Twitter.............................................................................................34 Content and Tone Through NATO Tweets.........................................................................42 Content and Tone Through Verbal Communication..........................................................47 Comparative Analysis....................................................................................................................52 Comparing Content: NATO Tweets vs. Verbal Communications........................................52 Comparing Tone: NATO Tweets vs. Verbal Communications.............................................56 How Do Communications Relate to the Agenda? .............................................................57 Conclusion.…………………………………………………………………………………………….…………………..……...……60 Appendix.......................................................................................................................................67 Bibliography..................................................................................................................................73 World Leaders a - T w i t t e r | 4 Introduction The increasing prominence of social media as an extension of social and political spheres poses a dual-use challenge to today’s population. Large bodies of literature have evaluated how social media have both benefitted societies and become weaponized. In 2011, social media perpetuated a democratic push across the Middle East and northern Africa that toppled authoritarian regimes in what became known as the Arab Spring. Social media have also given voices to the powerless, evidenced by hashtag activism, such as #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, and #Kony2012. Nevertheless, digital platforms have also served as the battlegrounds for disinformation and the undermining of democracy. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, for example, have all been used to disseminate malicious state and non-state propaganda. In the wake of an active and politicized cyberspace, heads of state and government from all around the world have flocked to their keyboards and smartphones to disseminate their own messages. Twitter, in particular, has been a favored platform for politics, popularized by the 45th President of the United States, Donald J. Trump (Lüfkens 2018; Parmelee and Bichard 2012). With Twitter’s rising political popularity, heads of state and government have been using Twitter to communicate with both their constituents and with one another. Twitter has therein provided the international system with a new platform to voice the successes and grievances of individual nations, moving conversations between world leaders out from behind closed doors and rolling cameras and into cyberspace. Before social networking sites like Twitter, world leaders depended heavily on traditional mass media and face-to-face meetings to propagate their messages around the globe and to other leaders. Twitter, however, has permitted leaders to overcome these World Leaders a - T w i t t e r | 5 restrictions, providing them with 24-hour access to their domestic and international publics. Although stark differences exist between verbal communications, such as at international summits and press conferences, and computer mediated communications in the Twittersphere, many world leaders still choose to actively engage in the platform. In fact, of all current United Nations members, 97 percent have an official Twitter presence (Lüfkens 2018). Among these state representatives, President Donald Trump has become the most followed world leader on Twitter with 58.4 million followers on his personal account, @realDonaldTrump, while his official account, @POTUS, ranks fifth with 25.2 million followers.1 Figure 1: Most Followed World Leaders in 2019 70,000,000 60,000,000 50,000,000 40,000,000 30,000,000 Followers 20,000,000 10,000,000 0 *Vatican data is a total of all nine different language accounts. 1 Data as of February 20, 2019. World Leaders a - T w i t t e r | 6 In the Age of the Twitter President, scholars have been investigating how and why politicians use Twitter. Despite the large body of academic work addressing these questions, few studies branch out beyond the United States to investigate international politicians’ implementation of Twitter, and none compare the platform to verbal political communications to investigate a difference in content and tone, or to understand Twitter’s agenda-building effects on face-to-face negotiations. This study seeks to fill this gap in the literature by evaluating Trump-era Twitter usage by three Western leaders in the context of the 2018 NATO Summit. The world leaders selected for this study include U.S. President Donald Trump, French President Emmanuel Macron, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau – all of whom possess verified Twitter accounts. These world leaders have been selected due to their overwhelming popularity on Twitter with over 3.5 million followers each. These three are also interesting because of their positions as the leaders of powerful nations in the current international system that belong to the twelve original NATO members. Additionally, they were selected due to language restrictions since only English and French could be accurately understood and analyzed by the author and translator. The 2018 NATO Summit sets the scene for this qualitative approach since all NATO member nations have official representation on Twitter, and the recent Summit on July 11-12, 2018 produced contemporary Twitter and verbal communication for data. Additionally, NATO summits follow a traditional diplomatic framework that is well-covered by the press, and as a stable 70-year-old alliance it will likely continue meeting for years to come, allowing future research to readdress this paper’s findings. Thus, the content and tone of three world leaders’ World Leaders a - T w i t t e r | 7 on- and offline communications will be compared, and communications will be evaluated with respect to the Summit agenda. Accordingly, I format my research questions: (1) Do communication platforms influence the content and tone of statements made by heads of state and government? (2) Do different communication strategies and content across platforms affect official, in- person summits through agenda-building? This paper begins by