Trump Vs Clinton: social media’s role in the 2016 US election
Trump Win!
On November 8th,2016, a businessman without political experience, Donald Trump, has defeated Hillary Clinton, becoming the 45th president of the United States. This result shocked the whole world because a large number of media institutions and voters agreed that Hillary Clinton could win the election. However, at the last moment, Trump reversed the situation by 74 votes.
How did it happen?
Social media played an essential role.
Social media in the 2016 political election
Now, social media has become an essential tool for people to get information. Many political operatives and voters use social media platforms to share their political propositions and opinions. In the 2016 US Presidential Election, Sheryl Sandberg, a Facebook’s chief operating officer, mentioned that Facebook assisted more than 2 million Americans to vote in the 2016 US presidential election.
Furthermore, according to Pew Research Centre survey, 35% of 18–29-year-olds consider that social media is the most valuable source for getting information about the 2016 presidential election, which ranked higher than traditional news websites and cable TV news. Although the results reflected that the preference for social media decreased as the age increased, social media is still ranked an equal second behind cable TV news.
Thus, social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat be considered as a critical factor of the election promotion in the 2016 election. Two candidates’ promotion team used social media to communicate and shared information with the public. For instance, Trump and Hillary’s Facebook page received over 24 million likes. Besides, both political candidates used SnapChat to pay for promotional geo-filter. As SnatChat’s data showing, filters which two candidates used reach 40%-60% Snapchat users in the US.
However, what features make social media become an influential tool before the presidential election?
Why is it essential?
According to Vincent Raynauld, an assistant professor in communication area at Emerson college, indicated that social media makes information sharing democratically, which helps the person who has narrow interests quickly and efficiently to connect people who have a similar opinion with them. Also, Alex Bruns holds the same opinion that social media provides a new
communication way for individuals to build their particular publics network or engage in theme-specific publics even event-driven. Their opinion reflects the fact that social media creates a “public sphere” successfully to assist people to communicate with each other, especially the people who have the same opinion. Besides, according to Axel Bruns and Tim Highfield said, publics will follow their logics and norms to utilize social media with their purpose. Karen North also insists, sometimes people not only hope to know what’s up but also they want to discover some like-minded people to seek a sense of identity and they will try to prove their opinion is correct through communication. It reflects that people probably will feel better when they are sharing their opinion to like-minded people and get support from them, which make them feel excited and feel the authenticity of the content which they “trust”. Politicians used this sense of “identity” to publish political content to get close to their target voters. For instance, in the case of Trump, some unfiltered comments on his twitter which create a conducive to trump’s public space. His voters found many people with similar views in his social commentary and communicate with each other. During the process of communicating, like-minded people can seek out echo chambers on social media and their political opinions can be reinforced because they get a lot of support from other people. For politicians, this kind of action makes them feel good because it means that he/her voters will be more loyal and irrational. They will magnify their “voices” to wipe out dissenters on social media. We can see that is what most voters for Clinton and Trump did in the 2016 US election. They were active in supporting their candidates on social media and finally it had a tremendous impact on the election results
Now, in the age of social media, we cannot ignore its influence in the 2016 US election. We also need to admit that social media assists us in knowing more about the candidate. However, the things we see on social media often echo- chamber, and we do not have an objective attitude to communicate with other people who have different opinions. The election ended, but we still use social media to get information on the internet. Can we look at people who have different views from us in a calm manner on social media? Can social media be repaired after the chaos in the presidential election? These problems are what we need to solve and mention after the election
