Using Social Media to Motivate Anti-migration Sentiments. Political Implications in the United States and Beyond

Abstract

The proliferation of nationalist and nativist movements all over the world has capitalized on the broad impact of social media, especially on Twitter. In the case of the United States, as candidate and then as President, Donald Trump initiated an active use of Twitter to disseminate his views on migration and migrants. This paper analyzes the themes and the political implications of his tweets from Trump’s electoral win to the end of the first year of his presidency. The authors’ assumptions are that Trump’s rhetoric untapped a collective sentiment against migration as well as one which supported views to protect migrant communities. The findings show that some topics were retweeted massively fueling the perceptions that most Americans were against migrant communities and their protectors. We conducted content analysis of the tweets sent by President Trump during his first year in the White House. We used the personal account of Trump in Twitter @realDonaldTrump. Trump has used his personal account as a policy and political media instrument to convey his messages rather than to use the official account that all Presidents have traditionally used @POTUS. Since Trump ran on a nativist platform with strong negative sentiments against migrants and immigration in general, we examined the tweets that relate to these topics.

Estrategias de Comunicación divergentes: entre el rigor y la manipulación. Análisis comparativo de la Comunicación Política de Estados Unidos y España frente a la etapa inicial de la crisis del COVID-19

“…Por el contrario, en el caso de Trump, la variable más común es la de la desinformación, una cuestión que rompe con los patrones de buena comunicación de crisis y buen gobierno, que se ve reforzada por la presencia de mensajes con contenido crítico y en los que elude su responsabilidad en la gestión de la crisis. En este sentido, su discurso, a pesar de la coyuntura crítica en la que se enmarca, no difiere de su línea habitual, mostrando rasgos de un líder populista, tendente a la polarización y la división (Hatcher, 2020;Nicasio et al, 2020), con las consecuencias negativas que ello puede tener para los ciudadanos, llevando a tomar decisiones sanitarias basadas en la ideología política (Allcott et al, 2020;De Bruine, 2020;Calvillo et al, 2020). Todo ello muestra una estrategia de comunicación convergente en los perfiles de las instituciones analizadas en España y EEUU, frente a una estrategia divergente en los relatos de los Presidentes de ambos países.…”

The Power of a Tweet? Social Media, Presidential Communication, and the Politics of Health

“…Several descriptive analyses now exist of President Barack Obama's and President Donald Trump's tweets, as well as tweets by unsuccessful presidential candidates (Fontaine and Gomez 2020; Galán‐García 2017; Hughes 2020; Lacatus 2021; Lee and Lim 2016; Nicasio‐Varea et al 2020; Ott and Dickinson 2019, 2020; Pain and Masullo Chen 2019; Pérez‐Curiel and Limón‐Naharro 2019; Ross and Rivers 2018; Şahin et al 2021; Wignell et al 2021). A smaller body of research has used observational methods (Pérez‐Curiel and Limón‐Naharro 2019; Scacco et al 2020; Zheng et al 2021) to study whether and how presidential communication impacts public opinion through these modern forms of media.…”