Social Media And American Politics—The Use Of Social Media In Elections And Governalce By Obama And Trump

The emergence and the rise of social media asserts tremendous influence in the current society.In politics,social media brings complex and profound changes.In Trump's era,his running the country by tweets catches the eyeballs from all walks of life.On one hand,he is praised for using Twitter in an unprecedented way in American politics.On the other hand,his Twitter storms appear to upset the American establishments and the mainstream media almost every single day.Does social media do good or do harm?What changes it may bring to America politics in the future?How we should look upon the role of social media?Those are questions waiting to be answered.But the rapid development of social media and the complexity of politics make it difficult to predict how social media usage will develop and how it will change the politics in the future.In order to pave way to answering those questions,it is urgent and necessary to figure out what is happening right now and what happened in the past.Obama and Trump are both the masters of social media in American politics.The current research focus on studying Obama's use of social media in elections.But there lacks systematic in-depth study on Obama's use of social media in governance and Trump's in both election and governance.Therefore,this paper concentrate on studying conducts a case study of Obama and Trump,s use of social media in elections and governance,trying to explore the changes of the social media use in American politics.This research is conducted from the perspective of agenda setting and framing,trying to explore what messages Trump conveyed on social media in the 2016 election and how Trump uses social media to resist to the mainstream media in the governance.Based on a considerable number of first-hand material,the research makes contribution to the existing research:All Trump's 13,701 tweets are collected by the software named "Bazhuayu" from Trump Twitter Achieve.News reports from The New York Times,The Washington Post,CNN are also examined.The paper finds that in elections,while Obama made a breakthrough of social media use in presidential campaigns,Trump changes the landscape of social media use in not only election but also in governance.In the election,there are two themes in Trump's Twitter use.First,Trump used Twitter to spread campaign ideas by sensational remark to drive the news coverage and further catch the public's attention.Second,Trump attacked the top five Twitter targets frequently,aggressively,and timely to directly influence the public agenda.In governance,Trump mainly use social media to resist to the mainstream.From May 2016 when he secured the Republican Nominee,Trump's attack on the biased mainstream media has surged.This is closely related to the changing tone of news coverage of Trump.Twitter functions as an important communication tool for Trump to bypass the mainstream media and talk directly to his voter base.In conclusion,Trump uses social media in an unprecedented way.On one hand,social media is used to strengthen the media's influence on the public.On the other hand,social media is used as an independent news media to bypass the mainstream media and put forth a unique agenda to the audience.From taking advantages of the news media in the election to resisting to the news media in governance,Trump shows to the world how social media can be fully employed in politics.