Helping populism win? Social media use, filter bubbles, and support for populist presidential candidates in the 2016 US election campaign

ABSTRACT

Undoubtedly, populist political candidates from the right and the left, including Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, changed the tenor and direction of the 2016 presidential contest in the US. Much like Barack Obama’s electoral successes that were credited at least in part to his savvy social media campaigning in 2008 and 2012, since Trump’s victory, the notion that social media ‘helped him win’ has been revitalized, even by Trump himself [McCormick, R. (2016a). Donald Trump says Facebook and Twitter ‘helped him win’. The Verge. Retrieved from http://www.theverge.com/2016/11/13/13619148/trump-facebook-twitter-helped-win]. This study therefore explores citizen support for populist and establishment candidates across the ideological spectrum in the US to specifically examine if using social media was related to an increased likelihood of supporting populist presidential political candidates, including Trump. Differing forms of active, passive, and uncivil social media were taken into account and the findings suggest active social media use for politics was actually related to less support for Republican populists, such as Trump, but that forms of both passive or uncivil social media use were linked to an increase in the likelihood of support to a level roughly equivalent to that of the traditional television viewing. These patterns are almost the inverse of support for Democratic populists, in this case namely Sanders.

KEYWORDS:

• Populism
• social media
• elections
• president
• campaigns
• Trump

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Jacob Groshek, PhD, is an Associate Professor in Emerging Media Studies and the Associate Director of the Center for Mobile Communication Studies at Boston University. He has over 45 peer-reviewed publications and his research focuses on the democratic utility of communication technologies and the ways in which the structure, content, and uses of online and mobile media may influence sociopolitical change. He also studies data mining and visualizing social media content, and he oversees a cloud-based software system, the Boston University Twitter Collection and Analysis Toolkit, which makes it possible for all researchers at any level to study social media in big and small data approaches. Dr Groshek also sits on the editorial boards of several leading journals and he has received top paper awards at the faculty and student levels in international competitions. He has previously held academic appointments at Iowa State University, Erasmus University Rotterdam (The Netherlands), the University of Melbourne (Australia), and was sponsored on a visiting scholarship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, France [email: [email protected]].

Karolina Koc-Michalska is Associate Professor at Audencia Business School, Communication & Culture Department, Nantes, France and Associated Researcher, CEVIPOF, Sciences-Po Paris [email: [email protected]].

Notes

1. Details follow in the methods section, but on this scale Kasich (0.24) was determined to be ‘least populist’ by Oliver and Rahn (2016), followed by Cruz (0.25), Rubio (0.49), Clinton (0.58), Carson (0.60), Trump (0.66), and Sanders (1.22).

2. Please see the original article by Oliver and Rahn (2016) for their methodology, which was based on an empirical examination of the syntax and language of each candidate to arrive at a statistically computed level of populism for each candidate from a dictionary of terms and keywords.

3. The correlation between active and passive online activity ranged between 0.6 and 0.7 depending upon whether it was measured by individual support for candidates or populism in aggregate.