—Victoria A. Farrar-Myers and Justin S. Vaughn
It is that time of the election cycle again, when presidential campaigns are gearing up and preparing for primary contests and, for a select few, general election races. As the would-be presidents seek to turn their electoral dreams into action, they are hiring staff, establishing PACs, and wooing donors. In addition, as many hopeful candidates have done in recent elections, they are building social media management teams, whose sole job it is to shape the candidate’s brand, leverage their political platform, and control ‘the message.’
In our recent volume, Controlling the Message: New Media in American Political Campaigns, we collected more than a dozen essays that draw on real-time data collected during the 2012 election cycle to analyze how the new politics of social media affect, and are affected by, political campaigns. As the 2016 elections approach, we plan to bring you a series of blog posts from authors of those essays that link this scholarly knowledge to ongoing developments in the world of politics.
The excerpt that follows is from the first of these pieces. Authored by Karen Hoffman of Marquette University, it examines the political rhetoric of comment forums found at online media sites. Professor Hoffman shows that the dynamics of comment forum rhetoric so far in this election cycle continue to demonstrate the characteristics she wrote about in Controlling the Message. Further, she makes key observations about what this rhetoric tells us about conservative Republicans in the current election cycle.
So, has the move to Facebook altered the substance of online public discourse? At this stage, it is difficult to compare current Facebook discussions with my original analysis. The 2012 data came from comments generated in the final months of the general election cycle, while we are barely into the primary season for 2016. Discussion during a primary season is likely qualitatively different from discussion during a general election, when internal party disagreement decreases. Keeping in mind that this is the primary stage, with most of the cycle still ahead us, two things stand out in comment forums. First, the changes in comment forums rules and venues have not changed the discourse. Second, conservative commenters are really angry at the Republican establishment…
Read the whole essay here, and follow the series on the NYU Press blog.
