Donald Trump and Social Media Twitter
Bekasi, 24 December 2022 -- According to M.L. Kent social media is any form of interactive communication media that allows for two-way interaction and feedback. The power of social media is now able to influence society only based on its social aspects, namely interaction and participation.
Social media is used by some people to share their thoughts with the general public. This use is not only carried out by the general public but politicians also take advantage of media issues to spread or share their thoughts with the public. Social media has four benefits for the political activities of a party or candidate, as information, service, access to political power and space. In other words, it can be said that social media is used as a means of political communication which is expected to build positive personal branding in the eyes of the public. Political Communication can be interpreted as a way of conveying messages with political characteristics that aim to influence the public.
The development of information technology that makes it easy to reach a wide range of people without taking a long time, has made social media the main center as a tool for political communication, social media that is often used by politicians or political groups, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.
One of the politicians who uses social media as a political communication tool is Donald Trump.
Donald Trump is an American politician and also the 45th former president of the United States who comes from the Republican party. He was elected as the 45th president of the United States after successfully defeating his opponent, Hillary Clinton from the Democratic party.
Donald Trump actively uses his social media especially Twitter as his political communication tool. Donald Trump's Twitter is his social media account that has the most followers compared to his other social media accounts, such as Instagram and Youtube. This may be the reason why Donald Trump is more active on Twitter.
Twitter was founded by Jack Dorsey in 2006. With many interesting features such as replies, retweets and likes.
Twitter is an internet based microblogging service, where users can send short, 140 character messages to each other. Its use is based on the rapid exchange of thoughts and information among friends, acquaintances and all users of the Twitter platform. Twitter's most frequent messages are called "tweets". These Tweets form a stream of messages that are followed in chronological order from a computer screen or another screen, such as that from a mobile phone. A kind of keyword called a “hashtag” can be added to a tweet to link the current message to several other messages, making it easier to follow messages. In conversations about society, Twitter can be an interesting communication, because the form of the message is very compact. In short messages, there is no opportunity to justify a point of view or quote sources, and because of this, political messages and conversations can be hotter and more important here than on other social media platforms (Conover, 2011).
Through his Twitter account @realDonaldTrump, Trump often raises specific issues related to US glory, anti-PRC sentiment, and anti-immigrant sentiment. These three issues are often voiced by Trump on his Twitter account, so that Trump is considered to want to instill thoughts on these issues to the US public. However, these three issues turned out to be included in the campaign promise that Trump gave when he ran for US President, by continuing to give his thoughts on these issues to the public so that they are considered important issues, what is expected is that support for his campaign remains stable or increases so that later Trump can continue his second term as President of the US even though in the end Trump failed to get his second term after losing to Joe Biden in the 46th US Presidential election.
It was the beginning of the campaign until the defeat of Donald Trump that caused some of the riots that occurred in the United States. Trump's supporters demonstrated in front of the Capitol when the vote count was carried out, Trump's supporters asked for the vote counting process to be stopped, because Donald Trump's supporters considered that there was fraud in the election. Seeing the demonstrations and riots being carried out by his supporters, Donald Trump actually made "tweets" which were considered to contain incitement to continue the protest.
