Exploring the Relationship Between Campaign Discourse on Facebook and the Public’s Comments: A Case Study of Incivility During the 2016 US Presidential Election
| Published date | 01 February 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0032321719890818 |
| Author | Feifei Zhang,Patrícia Rossini,Jennifer Stromer-Galley |
| Date | 01 February 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Special Issue Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321719890818
Political Studies
2021, Vol. 69(1) 89 –107
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0032321719890818
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Exploring the Relationship
Between Campaign Discourse
on Facebook and the Public’s
Comments: A Case Study of
Incivility During the 2016 US
Presidential Election
Patrícia Rossini1,
Jennifer Stromer-Galley2 and Feifei Zhang2
Abstract
Social media is now ubiquitously used by political campaigns, but less attention has been given to
public discussions that take place on candidates’ free public accounts on social media. Also unclear
is whether there is a relationship between campaign messaging and the tone of public comments.
To address this gap, this article analyzes public comments on Facebook accounts of candidates
Trump and Clinton during the US election presidential debates in 2016. We hypothesize that
attack messages posted by the candidates predict uncivil reactions by the public and that the
public is more likely to be uncivil when attacking candidates. We use content analysis, supervised
machine learning, and text mining to analyze candidates’ posts and public comments. Our results
suggest that Clinton was the target of substantially more uncivil comments. Negative messages by
the candidates are not associated with incivility by the public, but comments are significantly more
likely to be uncivil when the public is attacking candidates. These results suggest that the public
discourse around political campaigns might be less affected by what campaigns post on social
media than by the public’s own perceptions and feelings toward the candidates.
Keywords
political campaigns, online incivility, computational methods
Accepted: 25 September 2019
Introduction
Scholars have studied how campaigns have been using digital media for over two dec-
ades, with the focus shifting from the potential of the Internet to foster more interaction
1University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK
2Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, USA
Corresponding author:
Patrícia Rossini, University of Liverpool, 19 Abercromby Square, Liverpool L69 3BX, UK.
Email: patrícia.rossini@liverpool.ac.uk
890818PCX0010.1177/0032321719890818Political StudiesRossini et al.
research-article2020
Special Issue Article
90 Political Studies 69(1)
between candidates and citizens (Stromer-Galley, 2000; Xenos and Foot, 2005) to a more
utilitarian use of digital technologies as strategic communication tools (Bimber, 2014;
Foot and Schneider, 2006). With the rise of social networking sites in the past decade,
research has focused on understanding how these platforms have been used in strategic
ways by candidates to engage, energize, and mobilize voters without necessarily opening
more communication channels—a strategy described by Stromer-Galley (2019) as “con-
trolled interactivity.” Yet, as campaigns rely on social media, they are more visible and
can become increasingly subject to public criticism, as voters can comment on a candi-
date’s social media account to attack them on their character or policies. Despite candi-
dates’ resistance to enabling more horizontal forms of interaction with the public, citizens
are using social media to talk about the candidates, and to engage with each other and the
campaigns on candidates’ free social networking accounts.
Research has suggested that citizens leverage social media to reach out to political
leaders and are more likely to engage with politicians who have demonstrated a willing-
ness to respond, and also more likely to be negative toward politicians who are not
responsive on social media (Tromble, 2018). From the standpoint of deliberative democ-
racy, which values broader discussions in public spheres as means of informing and influ-
encing political decisions (Habermas, 1996), the ability for citizens to use social media to
express opinions about the elections and discuss politics is arguably desirable as it has the
potential to give voice and visibility to diverse claims and may serve to inform political
elites (Hendriks and Lees-Marshment, 2019). The public engages in an inherently public
discussion on social media (Reagle, 2015), whether or not candidates and campaigns
participate in these conversations or take them into account, and these discussions could
arguably inform voters’ perspectives about the candidates during the elections.
During political campaigns, candidates may adopt a negative, sometimes uncivil, tone
to satisfy strategic goals (Herbst, 2010). Politicians and political actors in the age of social
media are fueling what Sobieraj and Berry (2011) describe as outrage culture to provoke
visceral responses from their followers, such as anger, fear, and moral indignation. In
addition to using TV advertisement, live events, and debates to engage in negative cam-
paigning and attack opponents, candidates are increasingly leveraging the affordances of
social media—such as the ability to speak directly to their audience and the potential for
messages to go viral—to engage in negative campaigning. Research suggests that the
2016 election was the most negative on record (Fowler et al., 2016). Donald Trump’s
presidential campaign made personal attacks and name-calling a common occurrence,
especially on his favorite social media platform Twitter (Stromer-Galley, in press). News
outlets further amplified Trump’s attacks by reporting on them. The New York Times, for
example, created a running list of “people, places, and things Donald Trump insulted on
Twitter” since he declared his candidacy—a list with 280 entries during the campaign.1
Trump’s vulgar rhetoric provoked a public perception of negativity around the campaign,
despite the fact that Hillary Clinton’s did not engage in the same degree of animosity
toward her opponents as did Trump, but her television advertising was substantially more
negative than positive and more negative than Trump’s—but she did not engage in the
same degree of animosity (Fowler et al., 2016).
While research has investigated the potential relationship between elite use of social
media and agenda setting (see, for example, Feezell, 2018), little is known about the
extent to which messages sent by politicians online can influence public discussion, espe-
cially the effect of negative campaign messages, which have been the focus of a vast body
of literature in electoral politics (Geer, 2006). Research that studies political discussion
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