Twitter and politics. Evidences from the 2016 Us presidential primary campaigns

Social media's influence in the 2016 US presidential election has been stronger than it has ever been before and has led to the traditional media and the Democratic and Republican parties to lose "dominance" of public opinion to the "digital revolution". During their primary campaigns, candidates tweeted about 10 – 15 times a day to express their positions, to attack each other, to retweet endorsements, to encourage people to vote, to give news previews and a lot more. As a result, Twitter has become the most important communication channel for both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. The more candidates used Twitter to broadcast their thoughts, the more people retweeted them spreading their messages and journalists mentioned tweets in their election coverage creating a virtuous circle that brought more and more attention to the micro-blogging platform. This article analyzes the tweets of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in order to understand the communication strategies performed through this media.