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Twitter's Impact on 2016 Presidential Election Is Unmistakable Donald Twitter’s impact on 2016 presidential election is unmistakable By: Matt Kapko, senior writer, CIO, 11/3/2016 Twitter has played an outsized role in a 2016 presidential election that continues to test the electorate. Despite Twitter’s ongoing business problems, the ability of a single tweet to shape political conversation and drive media coverage has never been greater. A marked contrast exists between Twitter’s business acumen (or lack thereof) and the sometimes seemingly unintentional influence it wields on the current election. The leading candidates for America’s next presidency use Twitter to energize their supporters and draw citizens who wouldn’t otherwise follow political discourse. Twitter’s simple and personal messages resonate in a way that more traditional means of communication — mail robocalls and yard signs — no longer can. Donald Trump elevates Twitter Much of Twitter’s staying power in contemporary politics is directly related to Donald Trump’s clever, and at times haphazard, penchant for speaking his mind using tweets. Twitter is Trump’s medium of choice, and for the most part he has been rewarded for showcasing his freewheeling spirit. The presidential candidate’s ascent and Twitter’s significance on the political stage are inextricably linked. “Twitter was taken to a new level this year because of Donald Trump,” says Barry Burden, political science professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. “His aggressive and unconventional use of the platform generated news” for many days throughout the campaign, even when Trump’s tweets “violated standard norms of campaigns by being uncivil, conspiratorial or offensive.” Twitter’s real-time nature and emphasis on brevity make it especially well-suited for politicians and advisors who are skilled at crafting soundbites, according to Laurie Rice, associate professor of political science at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. “Twitter is also a useful form of two-way communication between candidates and campaigns and voters,” she says. “Candidates and campaigns can gauge reactions to their messages in real time, voters can easily share their views, and campaigns can track and respond to voters’ evolving views over the course of the campaign.” Political messaging now caters to social media to some degree, and consultants have turned heavily to Twitter to push their candidates’ agendas, according to Vincent Raynauld, assistant professor in communication studies at Emerson College in Boston. Trump is also particularly adept at using simple language to share his unfiltered views on Twitter in a way that matches his campaign branding, according to Raynauld. “When you read a tweet by Donald Trump you can almost hear Donald Trump’s voice, whereas if you’re reading tweets by Hillary Clinton from her Twitter account you can obviously see that it’s coming from campaign staffers,” he says. “You have a sense that every single tweet comes out of Donald Trump’s mouth to some extent and this has a very persuasive value to the public.” Twitter encourages discourse … for better or worse A recent survey by the Pew Research Center found that social media fuels widespread polarization and partisan animosity, and the associated debates turn off more people than they attract. Twitter is a popular outlet for contentious political conversation, but it isn’t alone. “Political content is as prevalent on Facebook (where users mostly follow people they know personally) as it is on Twitter (where users tend to follow a wider mix of connections),” the report reads. Major incidents can send service desk processes into disorder. Systems produce the data needed to resolve these incidents, but the challenge is getting that information to the appropriate people fast. Social media enables conversations that never would have happened without it, according to Irina Raicu, internet ethics program director at Santa Clara University’s Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. “But the unfiltered aspect of social media has also led, on some platforms, to some very toxic exchanges — toxic enough to drive people completely out of the conversation,” she says. “We have also seen that social media can enable the easy, fast and widespread dissemination of misinformation.” Twitter makes political discourse more accessible, but the 140-character limit also means it’s virtually impossible to share in-depth policy proposals on the service, Raynauld says. “This is oversimplifying the context of campaign discourse” and makes it difficult for people to get a greater understanding of the candidates’ cornerstone ideas, he says. Twitter has been particularly important to young adults, a group that now represents an equal share of the electorate as the baby boomer generation, according to the Pew Research Center. “Certainly they’re on Facebook, and people are talking about the election on Facebook, but Twitter has really taken center stage and kind of pushed Facebook off to the side, especially with younger voters,” says Laura Weir, executive director of international education at Florida SouthWestern State College. Future politicians will likely take cues from both Trump and Clinton on Twitter and apply lessons learned to future campaigns, according to Raynauld. “I suspect that politicians will go even more personal when it comes to politics in upcoming election cycles, where they will really let their personality shine through to show they’re not part of a machine, and that it’s really them talking.” The outcome of the 2016 presidential election should influence future politicians and their social media strategies, as well. Trump has consistently generated media coverage from traditional outlets thanks to his tweets. However, much of the associated reporting was “negative and came as a result of issuing inflammatory tweets,” Rice says. Clinton may have been more active on Twitter, but her account was also “more heavily managed by the campaign and did not seem to be as successful at generating news media coverage.” Will another election play out on Twitter? Twitter’s effect on the 2016 presidential election cycle will have lasting reverberations. Yet the company could potential be out of business by the time Americans head to the polls in 2020. The current election also reinforces the idea that Twitter is becoming less of a social network and more of a news-making medium with a social bent, according to Raynauld. Twitter’s future is uncertain, but the format it introduced will have a lasting impact on politics, he says. When Twitter’s cofounders formed the company a decade ago it’s unlikely that they “envisioned helping to transform the political landscape, but that’s what they have done,” Rice says. “Although they have struggled to find a profitable business model to support it, they ended up creating an important platform for political expression that has helped people find their voices.” Media’s Next Challenge: Overcoming the Threat of Fake News Jim Rutenberg, NT Times, 11/6/2016 The last year has turned the United States into a country of information addicts who compulsively check the television, the smartphone and the good old-fashioned newspaper with a burning question: What fresh twist could our national election drama and its executive producer, Donald J. Trump, possibly have in store for us now? No doubt about it: Campaign 2016 has been a smash hit. And to the news media have gone the spoils. With Mr. Trump providing must-see TV theatrics, cable news has drawn record audiences. Newspapers have reached online readership highs that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago. On Wednesday comes the reckoning. The election news bubble that’s about to pop has blocked from plain view the expanding financial sinkhole at the center of the paper-and-ink branch of the news industry, which has recently seen a print advertising plunge that was “much more precipitous, to be honest with you, than anybody expected a year or so ago,” as The Wall Street Journal editor in chief Gerard Baker told me on Friday. Papers including The Journal, The New York Times, The Guardian, the Gannett publications and others have responded with plans to reorganize, shed staff, kill off whole sections, or all of the above. Taken together, it means another rapid depletion in the nation’s ranks of traditionally trained journalists whose main mission is to root out corruption, hold the powerful accountable and sort fact from fiction for voters. It couldn’t be happening at a worse moment in American public life. The internet- borne forces that are eating away at print advertising are enabling a host of faux- journalistic players to pollute the democracy with dangerously fake news items. In the last couple of weeks, Facebook, Twitter and other social media outlets have exposed millions of Americans to false stories asserting that: the Clinton campaign’s pollster, Joel Benenson, wrote a secret memo detailing plans to “salvage” Hillary Clinton’s candidacy by launching a radiological attack to halt voting (merrily shared on Twitter by Roger Stone, an informal adviser to the Trump campaign); the Clinton campaign senior strategist John Podesta practiced an occult ritual involving various bodily fluids; Mrs. Clinton is paying public pollsters to skew results (shared on Twitter by Donald Trump Jr.); there is a trail of supposedly suspicious deaths of myriad Clinton foes (which The Times’s Frank Bruni heard repeated in a hotel lobby in Ohio). As Mike Cernovich, a Twitter star, alt-right news provocateur and promoter of Clinton health conspiracies, boasted in last week’s New Yorker, “Someone like me is perceived as the new Fourth Estate.” His content can live alongside that of The Times or The Boston Globe or The Washington Post on the Facebook newsfeed and be just as well read, if not more so. On Saturday he called on a President Trump to disband the White House press corps.
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