Presidential Communication in the “Tweetosphere”: A Functional and Network Analyses of President Trump’s Direct Messaging
Keywords:
Donald Trump, Twitter, functional analysis, social network analysisAbstract
This study examined President Donald J. Trump’s “tweetosphere”. It was a multimethod functional analysis of Trump’s ego network (him and the people he follows, mentions, retweets, and replies to) of 741 tweets and retweets in his first year of office. The findings indicate that President Trump tends to tweet about, retweet, and mention (tag) himself, his government, conservative media, and family more than people of opposing political ideologies and the mainstream media. More than a third of his tweets and retweets were positive self-acclaims, especially about his character, his government, family, and conservative media.References
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Arceneaux, K., & Johnson, M. (2013). Changing minds or changing channels?: Partisan news in an age of choice. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Arceneaux, N., & Weiss, A. S. (2010). Seems stupid until you try it: Press coverage of Twitter, 2006–9. New Media & Society. 12(8) 1262–1279.
Barabási, A.-L., & Albert, R. (1999). Emergence of Scaling in Random Networks. Science, 286(5439), 509-512.
Benoit, W. L. (1999). Seeing spots: A functional analysis of Presidential television advertisements, 1952-1996. Connecticut: Praeger.
Benoit, W. L. (2019). A Functional Analysis of Visual and Verbal Symbols in Presidential Campaign Posters, 1828–2012. Presidential Studies Quarterly, 49(1), 4-22.
Benoit, W. L. & Benoit-Bryan, J. M. (2014). A Functional Analysis of UK Debates in Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. Western Journal of Communication, 78(5), 653–667.
Benoit, W. L. & Stein, K. A. (2005). A Functional Analysis of Presidential Direct Mail Advertising. Communication Studies, 56(3), 203-225, DOI: 10.1080/10510970500181181.
Benoit, W. L., Blaney, J. R. & Pier, P. M. (2000). Acclaiming, Attacking, and Defending: A Functional Analysis of U.S. Nominating Convention Keynote Speeches. Political Communication, 17(1), 61-84. DOI: 10.1080/105846000198512
Benoit, W. L., Wen, W., & Yu, T. (2007). A Functional Analysis of 2004 Taiwanese Political Debates. Asian Journal of Communication, 17(1), 24-39. https://doi.org/10.1080/01292980601114521
Boyd, D. M., & Ellison, N. B. (2007). Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1).
Burt, R. S., (1992). Structural Holes: The social structure of competition. Cambridge, MA:
capital and college students’ use of online social network sites. Journal of computer-mediated communication, 12(4), 1143-1168.
Castells, M. (2009). Communication power. New York: Oxford Press.
Castells, M. (2015). Networks of outrage and hope: Social movements in the Internet age. Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons.
Cha, M., Haddadi, H., Benevenuto, F., & Gummadi, P. K. (2010). Measuring user influence in twitter: The million follower fallacy. Icwsm, 10(10-17), 30.
Dudek, P. & Partacz, S. (2009). Functional theory of political discourse. Televised debates during the parliamentary campaign in 2007 in Poland. Central European Journal of Communication, 2, 367-379.
Evans, H. K., Smith, S., Gonzales, A., & Strouse, K. (2017). Mudslinging on Twitter during the 2014 election. Social Media+ Society, 3(2), 2056305117704408.
Everett, M., & Borgatti, S. P. (2005). Ego network betweenness. Social networks, 27(1), 31-38.
French, D. C., Purwono, U., & Rodkin, P. C. (2012). Religiosity of adolescents and their friends and network associates: Homophily and associations with antisocial behavior. Journal of Research on Adolescence, 22(2), 326-332.
Gaouette, N., Collins, K., & Merica, D. (2018). Trump fires Tillerson, taps Pompeo as next secretary of state. Retrieved from https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/13/politics/rex-tillerson-secretary-of-state/index.html
Granovetter, M. S. (1973). The strength of weak ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78(6), 1360–1380.
Granovetter, M. (1983). The strength of weak ties: A network theory revisited. Sociological theory, 201-233.
Heim, K. (2016). Live tweeting a Presidential primary debate: Comparing the content of Twitter posts and news coverage. International Symposium on Online Journalism, 6(1). Retrieved from https://isojjournal.wordpress.com/2015/04/15/live-tweeting-a-Presidential-primary-debate-comparing-the-content-of-twitter-posts-and-news-coverage/
Himelboim, I., McCreery, S., & Smith, M. (2013). Birds of a feather tweet together: Integrating network and content analyses to examine cross‐ideology exposure on Twitter. Journal of Computer‐Mediated Communication,18(2), 40-60.
Himelboim, I., Smith, M. A., Rainie, L., Shneiderman, B., & Espina, C. (2017). Classifying Twitter topic-networks using social network analysis. Social Media+ Society, 3(1), 2056305117691545.
Isotalus, P. (2011). Analyzing Presidential Debates Functional Theory and Finnish Political Communication Culture. Nordicom Review, 32(1), 31-43.
Kadushin, C. (2012). Understanding social networks: Theories, concepts, and findings. New York: Oxford University Press.
Kumar, R., Novak, J., & Tomkins, A. (2010). Structure and evolution of online social networks. In Link mining: models, algorithms, and applications (pp. 337-357). Chicago: Springer.
Lee, C., & Benoit, W. L. (2004). A functional analysis of Presidential television spots: A comparison of Korean and American ads. Communication Quarterly, 52, 68-79.
Lee, J., & Xu, W. (2018). The more attacks, the more retweets: Trump’s and Clinton’s agenda setting on Twitter. Public Relations Review, 44(2), 201-213.
Lieberman, M. (2014). Visualizing big data: Social network analysis. In Digital research conference. (pp. 1-23).
Lusher, D., & Ackland, R. (2011). A relational hyperlink analysis of an online social movement. Journal of Social Structure, 12(5).
McCormick, R. (2016). “Donald Trump says Facebook and Twitter ‘helped him win.’” Retrieved from https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/13/13619148/trump-facebook-twitter-helped-win
McPherson, M., Smith-Lovin, L., & Cook, J. M. (2001). Birds of a feather: Homophily in social networks. Annual review of sociology, 415-444.
Meraz, S. (2013). The democratic contribution of weakly tied political networks Moderate political blogs as bridges to heterogeneous information pools. Social Science Computer Review, 31(2), 191-207.
Muralidharan, S., Rasmussen, L., Patterson, D., & Shin, J. H. (2011). Hope for Haiti: An analysis of Facebook and Twitter usage during the earthquake relief efforts. Public Relations Review, 37(2), 175-177.
Romero, D. M., Galuba, W., Asur, S., & Huberman, B. A. (2011, September). Influence and passivity in social media. In Joint European Conference on Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases (pp. 18-33). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.
Savage, C., & Shear, M.D. (2019). Trump Attack on Envoy During Testimony Raises Charges of Witness Intimidation. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/15/us/politics/trump-witness-intimidation.html
Shen, I. & Benoit, W. L. (2016). 2012 Presidential Campaign and Social Media: A Functional Analysis of Candidates’ Facebook Public Pages. The Midsouth Political Science Review, 17, 53-82.
Shor, E., van de Rijt, A., Ward, C., Askar, S., & Skiena, S. (2014). Is there a political bias? A computational analysis of female subjects' coverage in liberal and conservative newspapers. Social Science Quarterly, 95(5), 1213-1229.
Stieglitz, S., & Dang-Xuan, L. (2013). Emotions and information diffusion in social media—sentiment of microblogs and sharing behavior. Journal of management information systems, 29(4), 217-248.
Suhay, E., Bello-Pardo, E., & Maurer, B. (2018). The polarizing effects of online partisan criticism: Evidence from two experiments. The International Journal of Press/Politics, 23(1), 95-115.
Szell, M., Lambiotte, R., & Thurner, S. (2010). Multirelational organization of large-scale social networks in an online world. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(31), 13636-13641.
Wasserman, S., & Faust, K. (2009). Social network analysis: Methods and applications (Vol. 8). Cambridge university press.
Williams, S. A., Terras, M., & Warwick, C. (2013). What people study when they study Twitter: Classifying Twitter related academic papers. Journal of Documentation, 69 (3), 384-410.
Wilson, C., Boe, B., Sala, A., Puttaswamy, K. P., & Zhao, B. Y. (2009, April). User interactions in social networks and their implications. In Proceedings of the 4th ACM European conference on Computer systems (pp. 205-218).
Wimmer, R. D., & Dominick, J. R. (2011). Mass media research. Boston, MA: Wadsworth.
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