Enli, G. (2017). Twitter as arena for the authentic outsider: exploring the social media campaigns of Trump and Clinton in the 2016 US presidential election. (Maddie)

From Digital Culture & Society

Review - Maddie Staruch

The pervasiveness of social media seems to have seeped into every realm of people’s everyday life – it was only a matter of time before politicians began to fully take advantage of the platforms social media offers them. Whether used as an extension of ones’ professional campaign or as a way to view the inner mind and thoughts of a candidate, it is evident that social media is becoming a force to be reckoned with when it comes to political campaigns and major elections. Though it has not necessarily surpassed the mainstream modes of communication when it comes to politics, the author of this paper, Gunn Enli, suggests that social media now works in conjunction with external outlets such as television as users begin to multitask between various mediums. After outlining the historical context regarding research in social media, this article goes on to compare the methods employed over by the two main candidates of the 2016 Presidential Election, and evaluates their effectiveness in reaching out to voters.

To situate the current state of Twitter and social media in the political realm, Enli identifies three previous ‘eras’ of political communication and where we are headed currently:

1. “Golden Age of the Parties” – party dominated communication system

2. “Era of Television” – 1960s

3. “Digital Era” – Intensified personalization of political candidates, resulting in ideologies of anti-elitism, popularisation, and populism

4. “The Era of Social Media” – What we are in currently

The concept of the ‘era of social media’ was constructed as a result of the research for this paper and is one of the most important contributions of this article. It is important to be able to identify that we are now living in an era that is slightly evolved from just the ‘digital era’, as we are experiencing more than just digital interactivity between political candidates and voters than ever before. As Enli suggests, there is a unique experience of how people no longer treat things like TV as a stand-alone mode of political communication, but instead people are using it as a companion to information found on social media. This results that politicians are now expected to act in between platforms, and find a comfortable balance between their formal and informal selves, which is often handled by a highly skilled campaign team.

After the 2016 Presidential election, there was a lot of debate about the social media approaches taken by Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and Republican nominee Donald Trump. Enli situates two competing discourses as the key argument of his paper between Trump and Clinton over their Twitter accounts: he identifies that Clinton uses an approach of traditional political professionalism and Trump instead offers a counter-narrative of an amateur approach.

“The Controlled Politician” – The Clinton Strategy

Centered around expertise in the social media fields based of a foundation of solid research and previous/current trends, as well as an emphasis on the standardization of the candidates brand.

“The Authentic Outsider” – The Trump Strategy

Offers a sense of authenticity that strays from the calculated methods of professionalism, it focuses on a sense of being imperfect, and can seem more relatable to the everyday person as the format is less structurally sound.

As these are opposing narratives that reside on either side of the social media spectrum, Enli identifies that one of the key problems in political campaigns is making sure candidates strike the right balance between the ideal image of the candidate and the authentic version of themselves being portrayed over social media. One of the strongest points made in this article is the final line of Enli’s conclusion, which states that “social media represents an opportunity for both political outsiders and media campaign amateurs to succeed even as it disrupts the comfort zones of established politicians and their professionalized campaigns”. It suggests a new perspective to take when looking at how social media platforms like Twitter are being used as tool in the current political realm, and should be examined in further length in future research articles surrounding this topic.

The article concludes that:

1. Election campaigns used social media primarily as a marketing tool: over Twitter there was a clear need for Clinton to control the message while Trump was more willing to use the platform to initiate public debate

2. Professionalism is challenged by amateurism: amateurism is aligned with a kind of authenticity, whereas professionalism can alienate voters as politicians can come across as calculated and inauthentic, or less of an ‘everyday’ person to relate to.

3. Social media might have an agenda-setting impact: without Twitter, Trump would not have been able to capitalize on his celebrity and attract the mainstream media to make himself seem like a truly viable candidate. His ‘authenticity’ won him the Republican nomination.

I would suggest that, though it was touched upon briefly, the concept of ‘branding’ each candidate could have been analyzed further. As the two general categories of ‘professional’ versus ‘amateur’ were established, future research could consider more of the nuances in how social media went about specifically portraying both Trump and Clinton. As Enli points out, the Clinton campaign tried to use social media to make Hillary appear trendier and more ‘hip’, while Trump tried to appear ‘authentic’ in his more unhinged and unprofessional tweets. As mentioned in the conclusion, Enli suggests that social media could have an agenda-setting impact, which needs to be discussed in further length to identify the true impact social media can have on one’s voter base and overall campaign image.

While this article offered strong insight into the two main strategies at play in the 2016 election, there were a couple of major weaknesses. This article could have been better strengthened by a synthesis of how the historical eras of political communication have culminated in the current state of affairs. The information provided about how the Obama campaign pioneered the use of social media directly formed the way in which Hillary Clinton’s campaign executed their strategy, whereas Donald Trump’s came from a place of distinct anti-intellectualism and populism as a result of his celebrity status. While the different eras of political communication are discussed early on, it would have been more informative for Enli to explain how they contributed to where we are today, as he suggests the era of social media directly loops us back to a world where we return to ‘the golden age of parties’, except he parties are now campaigns. By specifying how this comes into play with both Trump and Clinton, there could have been a better historically connected argument that could outline the potential future effects of social media on political campaigns and how this affects the overarching discourses of the social media era.

Secondly, though this was more of a qualitative analysis of how each candidate opted for a different branding strategy, there could have been a wider sample of quantitative data collected, as the main statistics provided through the original research for this article were:

1. Amount of retweets

Trump: 25% retweets – 78% of which engaged with general public

Clinton: 15% retweets – Most of which were staff/campaign originated

2. Coded graph of the type of tweets that were made (whether they fell under the traditional ‘professional’ style of campaign message, the non-traditional ‘amateur’ style messages, and ‘neutral’ messages

Trump: 38.3% Traditional, 54.5 Non-Traditional, 7.2% Neutral

Clinton: 81.7% Traditional, 12.9% Non-Traditional, 5.4% Neutral

3. Use of “Authenticity Markers” (Impoliteness and political incorrectness)

33% of Trump tweets

5% of Clinton Tweets

These statistics were necessary and imperative to proving Enli’s point, however as previously mentioned, the paper could have benefitted from an expansion from just the basic overview of the style of Trump and Clinton’s Tweets to provide a more in-depth analysis.

In conclusion, the area of social media is a relatively new phenomenon, this article contributes important scholarly research in outlining new developments in types of political communication. As mentioned, we are currently in the ‘era of social media’, and the advancements made even between the 2008 election and 2016 election continue to prove that there will be rapid changes in pace, development, and strategy in this era. As controversial and heated as the 2016 election was, examining how the social media presences of both Clinton and Trump is essential to dissecting how a candidate like Donald Trump ended up in the White House. It identifies the main structural change in the way politicians reach their audiences: social media now offers a channel for candidates to access the means of production and distribution of various messages.

In the future, it could be considered that this study, while having a strong focus on the historical contexts of social media in the U.S. elections, only focuses on Clinton and Trump’s presences on Twitter. While Twitter provides easily analyzable tidbits of information, it does not completely encapsulate the totality of branding for each candidate. As the article mentions, both candidates used Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram. In the future, it would be pertinent to explore how other social media platforms were used, especially those that are considered to be ‘dying’ (i.e. Facebook), and those that are gaining popularity (i.e. Instagram), and how the different age and demographics of each platform’s user-base might be affected differently.

Reference

Enli, G. (2017). Twitter as arena for the authentic outsider: exploring the social media campaigns of Trump and Clinton in the 2016 US presidential election. European Journal of Communication,32(1), 50-61. doi:10.1177/0267323116682802