Managing political content in the online space of modern states: how twitter prevented D. Trump from winning the 2020 presidential election?

Abstract

The networked society is permeated with processes generated within numerous horizontal structures of the public sphere in the online space. An empirical study based on network analysis and graph visualization methodology allowed us to understand why D. Trump, using the same political communication strategy on Twitter that allowed him to win in 2015, lost the 2020 US Presidential Election. Who and how transformed the political content created by D. Trump's team; who became the influencer that changed and destroyed the discourse field originally created to support D. Trump in the second term campaign? The empirical data (a continuous sample of network data amounted to 2 million messages), which we used to constructs and analyze the discourse fields, comprises the messages published by ordinary users, supporters, opponents and D. Trump's team on Twitter within the period from March 1, 2020 to October 30, 2020. The study showed that D. Trump's second election campaign in 2020 was also based on network populism. However, the “negative information background” (Covid-19, Black Lives Matter) split the discursive fields he formed, which eventually resulted in ban from online platforms and election defeat. The technologies D. Trump used in his first election campaign, and which led him to the US presidency, actually became a potent weapon in the hands of his opponents in the second election campaign.