Abstract
A time of turmoil and uncertainty is invading the public sphere. Under the framework of the 2020 US elections, populist leaders around the world supported Trump’s speech on Twitter, sharing a common ideology and language. This study examines which issues (issue frame), and strategies (game frame) framed the messages of populism on Twitter by analyzing the equivalences through Trump’s storytelling and checking the bias of the media in the coverage of the US elections. We selected a sample of tweets (n = 1497) and digital front pages of global newspapers (n = 112) from the date of the Trump/Biden face-to-face debate (29 September 2020) until the Democratic party candidate was proclaimed the winner of the elections by the media (7 November 2020). Using a content analysis method based on triangulation (quantitative and qualitative-discursive), we analyzed the Twitter accounts of five leaders (@realDonalTrump, @MLP_officiel, @matteosalvinimi, @Santi_ABASCAL, and @Jairbolsonaro) and five digital front pages (The New York Times, O Globo, Le Monde, La Repubblica, and El País). The results show that populist politicians reproduced the discourse of fraud and conspiracy typical of Trump’s politics on Twitter. The negative bias of the media was also confirmed, giving prominence to a rhetoric of disinformation that overlaps with the theory of populism.
Highlights
The impact of the last United States (US) presidential elections on world geopolitics were unprecedented
We focused on Twitter because of its advantages for political communication in elections (Gainous and Wagner 2014; D’Heer and Verdegem 2015)
In addition to the issues and discursive elements of the messages published by these politicians on Twitter, our analysis considered their concordance with topics on the front pages of newspapers, since recent research has outlined the impacts of tweets in traditional media (Rúas Araújo et al 2018; Pérez-Curiel and Limón-Naharro 2019)
Summary
The impact of the last United States (US) presidential elections on world geopolitics were unprecedented. The assault on the Capitol (January 2021), carried out by extremist groups linked to the Republican party (The New York Times 2021), and the judicial impeachment process against Trump (February 2021) are consequences of populist rhetoric that mobilized citizens through social networks. Algorithms and bots are used for manipulation and computational propaganda (Woolley and Howard 2017). This practice fosters the uncontrolled dissemination of fake news in political processes (Powers and Kounalakis 2017). In line with this premise, social media contribute to the spread of disinformation (Rivas-de-Roca et al 2020), but it is necessary to consider other variables, such as the influence of populism, assessed as a persuasion tool through language (Fuentes Rodríguez 2020)
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