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Donald Trump’s prolific tweets mask a strategic use of the social media platform to divert the media from covering topics that are potentially harmful to him, according to new research.
Behavioral scientists from the Universities of Western Australia and Bristol have published a peer-reviewed paper on how The president of the United StatesTwitter messages affect news coverage.
Investigation follows Trump’s not be re-elected, something to which he has responded by repeatedly affirming on Twitter, without offering any proof, that he has been the victim of electoral fraud.
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The university’s analysis shows that the president has succeeded in suppressing negative media coverage, including Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections, by tweeting on other topics.
Since he first announced his candidacy for the White House in 2015, Trump has published more than 30,000 tweets that have been analyzed by many academics in numerous independent studies.
There is anecdotal evidence that his tweets have distracted news organizations from stories that could have negatively impacted the president’s reputation.
An example given by the researchers notes “When the Trump University deal of $ 25 million was made public in late 2016, Trump’s tweets focused on the controversy surrounding the Hamilton Broadway play, whose cast advocated a Diverse America at the End of a Performance “.
As a result of these tweets, the media focused much more on the Hamilton controversy than on the Trump University deal, anecdotally. But the researchers wanted a scientific method to analyze whether this was the case.
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To find a scientific way to examine whether Trump’s tweets succeeded in reducing news coverage of science stories, the researchers turned to coverage of the Mueller investigation by the New York Times and ABC News.
They selected a set of keywords that would match Trump’s preferred topics, such as “jobs,” “China” and “immigration,” and saw if tweets on those topics became more common following reports of the Mueller investigation.
They then measured whether these tweets in turn resulted in less coverage of the Mueller investigation, as media organizations were quick to report the new tweets, including fact-checking.
According to the researchers, their analysis “presents empirical evidence that is consistent with the hypothesis that President Trump’s tweets systematically divert attention from a potentially harmful topic to him, which in turn appears to suppress media coverage of that topic.”
However, they add: “It is not clear whether the president is aware of his strategic deployment of Twitter or acts on the basis of intuition.”
The research was published in the journal Nature Communications.
