Social Media and Political Campaigning Deconstructed

Social media has taken over the world, especially in the way we campaign for political positions. Michael Bossetta decided to research social media’s impact on political campaigning during the 2016 U.S. election.

When you look at Bossetta’s research, it breaks down into five sections: the abstract, the hypothesis, the methodology, the results, and the discussion.

The abstract gives a quick introduction and overlook of the study. Bossetta uses the 2016 U.S. election to argue that political communication on social media is dependent on the social media platform’s architecture. In simpler terms, political campaigning is different on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat.

Bossetta states in his hypothesis that the digital architecture of a social media platform influences campaign practices and strategies and that this is not solely affecting political campaigning but online political communication as a whole, such as political debates among citizens, protest mobilizations, or journalistic reporting.

To conduct this study, Bossetta used multiple methodologies. Bossetta used the 2016 U.S. election as his

case study. He collected qualitative data from interviewing three Republican digital strategists who worked on four Republican candidates’ campaigns during the election. Then for quantitative data, he used social media data from Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. Data for Twitter were not collected during the study’s time frame, but Bossetta used data from the platform during the week before Super Tuesday and the two weeks after. While these elements do not explicitly test digital architectures’ effects, they do help compare cross-platform research.

Bossetta found three interesting results after his study. The first being campaigns shared much of the same content across different social media platforms. The second is that both the interviews with digital strategists and social media data showed that Facebook dominated political campaigning throughout the 2016 election cycle. Lastly, even though Facebook may have dominated and campaigns did not invest as much in newer platforms like Instagram and Snapchat, the campaigns and candidates were still very active on these platforms, especially Instagram.

The discussion section is similar to the conclusion section in a school paper. For Bossetta’s study, he makes an important note that digital architectures are subject to rapid and transformative change and that future scholars may want to look into social media platforms that were not analyzed in the study and that how changes in platforms can influence campaign practices over time.

Michael Bossetta and his study point out that social media is the future of political communication and campaigning. If you want to work on a campaign, social media management is a necessity.