Politics in Social Media: Is All Publicity Good Publicity?

Posted on by Lauren Grubb

Having just had the Presidential election, social media is filled with different opinions and opposing views. It’s interesting to see how a single hashtag can be used in drastically different ways. To analyze this further I chose to observe conversation around Donald Trump, by searching #Trump.

Although some of the tweets against #Trump may stem from democrats disagreeing with republicans, many of the tweets against him are instead criticizing the idea that he promotes hate, discrimination, and stereotypes. Additionally, some tweets against #Trump criticize the electoral college.

Contrastingly, the tweet by @SirJadeja addresses the fact that Trump’s administration team contains a woman, gay man, and black man, in order to try to prove that the negative claims about Trump are false.

Tweet by @2ALAW addresses the belief that all Trump supporters are dark, divisive, and dangerous, and shows evidence of dangerous and acts committed by Clinton supporters.

 

3 thoughts on “Politics in Social Media: Is All Publicity Good Publicity?”

  1. Lauren – Interesting approach on #Trump as well as peoples’ views on the election results. I feel like, especially on social media, opinions are notoriously skewed to extremely right or extremely left. The fact that you were able to expose just how complex American’s opinions really are was great! I also feel like following the #Trump hashtag was a good choice because it ties back to what Professor Grygiel was saying about how there is really no good way about analyzing sentiment on channels such as Twitter, only words and phrases.

  2. Lauren, I thought this analysis was extremely well-done and such an important subject matter, especially since this is the first election where social media has played SUCH a large role in the outcome. People are so quick to jump to conclusions about social media, thinking they know all they need to know about it firsthand (and that it’s all surface-level analytics). In reality, as you effectively brought up, there is a deeper analysis that has to be made. I can’t even count how many election reporting sites I saw that referenced Twitter mentions such as the ones you listed above. Not once was tonality taken into account, proving even more so that social media as a whole led to tons of false data/information surrounding this past election season.

  3. I think this post is pretty spot on. Twitter users are operating with a completely different set of facts when they talk about the election and the state of our government. It’s got to be the job of elite media to present the facts fairly and evenly.

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