Trump and Citizen Media

Donald Trump won the citizen media war.

According to Google, Trump was searched 3 times more than Hilary Clinton. He had 4 million more Twitter followers than Clinton. Why do these facts matter?

A recent study was done by the University of California and Stanford University, which highlighted that 42 percent of American television viewers ignore or turn to another channel in order to avoid watching campaign commercials. Why is this?

Well the reason being is that there is an increasing spread of distrust for American mainstream media. The University of California and Stanford University also highlighted that only 1 and 4 of millennial voters said that they collected political knowledge from television ads. Proof that young viewers are becoming more aware of the information they are consuming and have been relying on other sources such as social media or third party media outlets to inform themselves. John Fiske, the philosophic academic explained, "that our media resources are limited and will always be so, [as long as] they are [commercially] reliant on corporate sponsorship" (Fiske, 1996). However, this past American election has proven that politicians and their teams are becoming more aware of this change and have adapted their political marketing tactics to appeal to younger audiences.

Trump's ascendance as a political candidate can largely be credited to his rise on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Prior to this campaign social media was beneficial for politicians because it allowed them to identify and target individual voters, while extracting donations. However, it can be said that Trump's team took a couple pointers from Obama's two campaigns and used social media to not only inform but to recruit energetic supporters. Trump's often raciest, misogynist and profane tweets were seen as honest, transparent and bold, as compared to Hilary Clinton's campaign that was often too calculated and lacked transparency.

Trump mastered Twitter, with the New York Times estimating that by Trump using citizen media he had provided himself and his campaign up to $2billion of free marketing. Though his tweets often lacked truth, it did not seem to bother his followers for Trump had targeted the increasing resentment and distrust towards large corporate media institutions. By the end of the campaign, Trump's followers had believed that mass media institutions and the Democrat party had been sold out to corporate lobbyists and no longer represented the ordinary American citizen. Thus, to Trump followers kept repeating his common narratives of factual falsehoods and racist rhetoric, which created an insurmountable political movement.

For decades political theorists wondered have citizen media would affect politics by examining the past three elections: 2008, 2012 and 2016 the results are down-founding. Trump, like Obama before him, used citizen media as his main pillar for his political campaign, realizing that these outlets engage and motivate individuals unlike any other media outlet seen previously.

The press used to be a bastion of free and fair speech. with the death of print and radio news, television and media news took its place, but as shown above, but these current media outlets now lack the truthful expression that they once may of carried in the 1960's for example. Thus it is becoming more and more clear that the internet social media circles are like those of the market, or old public sphere. They are the keepers of honest, and open expression - whether its a medium we truly want is not my choice to say. But what I can say is it seems to have been the medium more of America chose to use within this past election.