The medium made the Man: Did Donald Trump’s use of social networks influence American voters in US election 2016?

As social media have incredibly come to dominate our everyday life, at least in western and globalized countries, I wanted to deepen how they are currently exploited by politicians. To this purpose, the case of 2016 US presidential elections serves as the perfect example of the booming implementation of social networks like Facebook and twitter in electoral campaigns. Specifically, I analysed the unprecedented Donald Trump’s use of these platforms in his general race to the presidency. It is difficult to state whether such manipulative use of social media might have swung the election results, but, for sure, they played an important role in winning Trump the presidency.
The Trump’s campaign team exploited Facebook by spreading thousands of different advertisings perfectly tailored to the public they were directed to thanks to their massive data-mining activities. The Trump’s team quickly scaled Facebook advertising platform and brilliantly mastered its various advertising tools in order to produce lots of highly persuasive advertising pieces aimed both to mobilize and suppress different slices of the electorate. Such ads bombarded swing states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, which after years of democratic hegemony they turned to Trump, thus revealing a probable correlation between Trump’s digital operations and lower democratic turnout.
In addition to the active use of social media by the Trump’s campaign team, such digital platforms helped him to win the elections in a much subtler way. Since the algorithms ruling the Internet suppressed the historical gatekeeping role of traditional media, demagogues like Trump have nowadays the power to control the information flows through social media. Trump’s personal use of Twitter contributed to attract journalists desperately seeking for the latest shocking tweets to transform into braking news. With algorithms values replacing flesh and blood editors’ values, Legacy journalism contributed to the creation of Trump’s character with numerous sensationalistic articles reporting his bombastic and false statements in order to give visibility to their contents and generate revenues. They had been ridiculing and criticising Trump all along the race and beyond, ignoring the hopelessness of rural Trump voters. While most important American newspapers massively fostered Clinton’s campaign, they were not seeing how tall and thick the wall between two polarized Americas was becoming. As consequence, Trump backers’ mistrust in traditional media pushed them to rely on the latest digital news outlets anchored around Breitbart news, which put forth a misleading, highly partisan view of the world exploiting social media as a backbone. Facebook in fact fostered the creation of two different filter bubbles of polarized voters, one made up of mainstream media readers and the other made up of Breitbart consumers. For Users enclosed in their comfortable and pro-attitudinal echo chambers on Facebook, the possibility to confront themselves with dissimilar opinions it’s severely undermined. Also, the spread of misinformation and fake news is enhanced. Within Breitbart filter bubble mutually-reinforcing hyper-partisan sites combined decontextualized truths, repeated falsehoods, and leaps of logic to create a fundamentally misleading view of the world. By repetition, variation, and circulation through many associated sites, the network of sites made their claims familiar to readers, and this fluency with the core narrative gives credence to the incredible.
On social media, emotions are leveraged to generate attention and viewing time, which converts to advertising revenue and both American mainstream media and other fake news generators mastered such strategy. As the more fervent and discussed moral issues were principally those dictated by Trump and the right-led news outlets like Breitbart, news agencies overwhelmingly wrote about immigration and Clinton’s leaked emails in a deliberately affective way designed to provoke voter outrage.