The Semiotics of Authenticity: Indexicality in Donald Trump’s Tweets

Abstract

How do you produce an authentic self on social media? This question is increasingly critical for the modern politician. Many voters prize authenticity as more important than policies, and social media is playing an ever-greater role in electoral politics. Further critical attention is required to understand how politicians are using social media to present an authentic self as a strategy to win votes. Whereas previous research has focused on how the content of politicians’ messages affects their authenticity, this article explores how authenticity is produced through formal aspects of self-presentational cues. To do so, the article analyzes the authenticity cues in Donald Trump’s tweets during the 2016 United States election. In what was widely dubbed as “the authenticity election,” Trump was able to present an authentic self on Twitter using little more than 140 alphanumeric characters. What cues were at play, and why did they work? By analyzing how news media narrated Trump’s authenticity, and applying a semiotic analysis based on the theory of Charles Sanders Peirce, this article uncovers the key authenticity cues in Trump’s tweets, and examines the semiotic mechanisms behind them. I show that Trump’s authenticity depended upon the deployment of indexes, signs that bear a causal link to the object they refer to. Trump’s indexes of the self—the typographic texture, the tweets’ timestamps, and the operating system tags—combined to produce an authentic form for Trump’s tweets to inhabit. I then close with observations of indexical authenticity being leveraged by other politicians.