IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/nat/natcom/v11y2020i1d10.1038_s41467-020-19644-6.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Using the president’s tweets to understand political diversion in the age of social media

Author

Listed:
  • Stephan Lewandowsky

    (University of Bristol
    University of Western Australia)

  • Michael Jetter

    (University of Western Australia
    IZA
    CESifo)

  • Ullrich K. H. Ecker

    (University of Western Australia)

Abstract

Social media has arguably shifted political agenda-setting power away from mainstream media onto politicians. Current U.S. President Trump’s reliance on Twitter is unprecedented, but the underlying implications for agenda setting are poorly understood. Using the president as a case study, we present evidence suggesting that President Trump’s use of Twitter diverts crucial media (The New York Times and ABC News) from topics that are potentially harmful to him. We find that increased media coverage of the Mueller investigation is immediately followed by Trump tweeting increasingly about unrelated issues. This increased activity, in turn, is followed by a reduction in coverage of the Mueller investigation—a finding that is consistent with the hypothesis that President Trump’s tweets may also successfully divert the media from topics that he considers threatening. The pattern is absent in placebo analyses involving Brexit coverage and several other topics that do not present a political risk to the president. Our results are robust to the inclusion of numerous control variables and examination of several alternative explanations, although the generality of the successful diversion must be established by further investigation.

Suggested Citation

  • Stephan Lewandowsky & Michael Jetter & Ullrich K. H. Ecker, 2020. "Using the president’s tweets to understand political diversion in the age of social media," Nature Communications, Nature, vol. 11(1), pages 1-12, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:nat:natcom:v:11:y:2020:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-020-19644-6
    DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-19644-6
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19644-6
    File Function: Abstract
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1038/s41467-020-19644-6?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Stefan Lehrner, 2022. "Agenda setting in social media election campaigns," Eximia Journal, Plus Communication Consulting SRL, vol. 5(1), pages 158-169, July.
    2. Amarasinghe, Ashani, 2023. "Public sentiment in times of terror," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 162(C).
    3. Timothy Besley & Thiemo Fetzer & Hannes Mueller, 2023. "How Big Is the Media Multiplier? Evidence from Dyadic News Data," CESifo Working Paper Series 10619, CESifo.
    4. Bräuninger, Thomas & Marinov, Nikolay, 2022. "Political elites and the “War on Truth’’," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 206(C).
    5. Amarasinghe, Ashani, 2022. "Diverting domestic turmoil," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 208(C).
    6. Dragomirescu-Gaina, Catalin & Philippas, Dionisis & Goutte, Stéphane, 2023. "How to ‘Trump’ the energy market: Evidence from the WTI-Brent spread," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 179(C).
    7. Jana Lasser & Segun T. Aroyehun & Fabio Carrella & Almog Simchon & David Garcia & Stephan Lewandowsky, 2023. "From alternative conceptions of honesty to alternative facts in communications by US politicians," Nature Human Behaviour, Nature, vol. 7(12), pages 2140-2151, December.
    8. Xiangyu Wang & Min Zhang & Weiguo Fan & Kang Zhao, 2022. "Understanding the spread of COVID‐19 misinformation on social media: The effects of topics and a political leader's nudge," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 73(5), pages 726-737, May.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nat:natcom:v:11:y:2020:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-020-19644-6. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.nature.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.