Abstract
(1) In a context of an unprecedented global pandemic, an analysis of the effects of political disinformation on audiences is needed. The U.S. election process culminating in the official proclamation of Joe Biden as president has led to an increase in the public’s distrust of politics and its leaders, as public opinion polls show. In this context, the change in the electorate’s attitude towards Donald Trump, throughout the legislature and especially after the elections, stands out. So, the objective of this research was to determine, through the measurement of surveys, the views of the electorate on the behavior of the Republican candidate and the possible causes that determine the loss of confidence in his speeches and comments. (2) The methodology, a comparative quantitative-qualitative approach, analyzed the responses collected by Pew Research waves 78 and 80 (2020 and 2021). Specifically, the surveys analyzed were 11,818 U.S. adults in the case of the American Trends Panel 2020 and 5360 in the case of the same panel for 2021. (3) Results showed the change of position of the electorate, especially Republicans, in the face of the policy of delegitimization of the process and Trump’s populist messages on Twitter. (4) Conclusions pointed in two directions: society has decided not to trust Trump, while at the same time showing distrust about the correct management of the electoral ballot.
Highlights
Post-election polls of the US presidential election (3 November 2020) state that 60%of Americans think that Biden legitimately won the election; the same poll asserts that 70% of Republicans pointed out that the Democratic candidate was not legitimately elected (Balz et al 2021)
The study serves as a precedent for others that are already being developed on the role of Twitter and the media as verifiers of information on the electoral process in the U.S, in a context of maximum disinformation manifested in the opinion polls
Once the elections were held, Donald Trump’s campaign remained active, especially on the social network Twitter, and disseminated a whole series of messages with which it constructed the story of electoral fraud
Summary
Post-election polls of the US presidential election (3 November 2020) state that 60%of Americans think that Biden legitimately won the election; the same poll asserts that 70% of Republicans pointed out that the Democratic candidate was not legitimately elected (Balz et al 2021). The direct consequences are related to the instability of representative democracy (Mounk 2018) and of constitutional rights in a pandemic context, which favors the increase of misinformation (Salaverría et al 2020) In this context, the rise of fake news in social networks (Van Der Linden et al 2020) has occurred in parallel with the primacy of extreme political populism (Román-San-Miguel et al 2020; Kissas 2019). He is a leader who advocates negationism, as opposed to reason, appeals to emotion and defends anti-intellectualism and politically incorrect language, vindicating the simple man (Almansa Pérez 2019). In this context, the theory of the multimodal use of the network stands out (Bracciale and Martella 2017), with a key role in the development of electoral campaigns (Campos-Domínguez 2017). For this study, we opted for a definition of a populist communication style, since we started from the theory of discursive approaches already launched by Cox (2018), Bracciale and Martella (2017), Block and Negrine (2017) and, more recently, from the contributions of Pich and Newman (2020)
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