Twitter Strategies Used During the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election: Donald Trump and Mike Pence vs. Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine

• In Event: The 2016 Election and Social Media

Abstract

Recent research has examined the political use of social networking sites. To understand how politicians used Twitter in the 2016 U.S. presidential election we examined the Twitter posts from Donald Trump, Mike Pence, Hillary Clinton, and Tim Kaine. We collected data using Crimson Hexagon, a commercial social media analytics library and application. For each candidate, all Tweets from September 5th to November 8th 2016 were collected. We used the text mining Package in R) and Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LWIC) to analyze the content. Our primary findings show that Hillary Clinton heavily focused on mobilization and not much on donation while Donald Trump heavily focused on Donation and not on mobilization in their Twitter posts. Our results also show that Donald Trump could elicit more reactions from Twitter users via his negative posts. However, Hillary Clinton could not seem to motivate Twitter engagement by going negative.

Authors

• Meredith Yiran Wang, Stephen F. Austin State U

• Porismita Borah, Washington State U

• Qin Li, Washington state U

• Itai Himelboim, U of Georgia