Honors Thesis

For my last blog post, I wanted to share what I've been working on as a graduating Honors student, which is my thesis! Here is a short passage from my thesis, which in regards to social media usage, relates to this class:

The data shows that although both candidates were being used in connection with Twitter, Trump got substantially more attention with his tweets than Clinton did. This is not all that surprising, since most people found Trump’s tweets as something to talk about in relation to the campaign, with most reporters, talking about Trump’s Twitter rants about always speaking his mind and 3AM tweets. Here is an example from October 11th FOX O’Reilly Factor broadcast:

So, joining us now from Dallas is Donald Trump. All right. First of all, you tweeted today, it is so nice that the shackles have been taken off me. And I can now fight for America the way I want to. What exactly does that mean? (2016)

This seems to show that journalists are tending to look to Twitter mainly in terms of entertainment value. The tweets they pulled tended to focus on “controversies” of the campaign, such as Trump’s decision to tweet at 3AM, meaning he was rash and not fit to be President, or his comment to Hillary Clinton calling her a “nasty woman,” as well as knocking Republicans and the media for not standing behind him (fake news). The tweets journalists used supplemented his image as a man that speaks his mind, and they were not being used to talk about his policy ideas.

Clinton’s tweets that were pulled also surrounded on the news of Trump. Her tweets were used in context as a response to what Trump had been saying. A CNN Newsroom broadcast from September 30th shows Clinton’s side below:

Her [Clinton’s] campaign has already launched its counteroffensive against Trump on Twitter, sending out even more tweets than Trump defending the former Miss Universe, Clinton's tweets calling Trump -- quote -- "unhinged."

Another says that -- quote -- "Alicia deserves praise for courageously standing up to Trump's attacks and he has the gall to blame her and say he helped?"And this Clinton tweet: "When something gets under Donald's thin skin, he lashes out and can't let go. This is dangerous for a president. (2016)Trump is the source of the story, and Clinton provides the evidence. Rarely were the tweets being used in terms of policy or fact-checking. They were mostly being used for attention-grabbing stories. The stories making headlines were not “Trump’s new plan for x” or “Clinton wants y to change.”  They focused on the character, on the way the candidates interacted with each other and with the world via an online platform. There were obvious periods of time when Twitter was used more frequently by a majority of news agencies. These times were recorded to fall around when Trump had said something controversial, or Clinton had tweeted at Trump. This just confirms that reporters were only using Twitter to provide truth to an entertainment story. Twitter was not being used as supportive evidence in terms of policy talk, but more so focused on the candidates’ character traits in using Twitter being indicative of how they would behave in the Presidency.