Twitter's Agenda-Setting Role: A Study of Twitter Strategy for Political Diversion

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how Donald Trump used Twitter during 2020 to divert attention from Covid-19 issues and examines the effectiveness and nature of his communication strategy through empirical analysis.

Contribution

It provides an empirical investigation of Trump's Twitter strategy for political diversion and its impact during the Covid-19 pandemic, using regression and time series analysis.

Findings

Twitter was used to divert attention from Covid-19 reports

Trump's tweets had a significant political communication effect

No evidence of false claims being used for diversion

Abstract

This study verified the effectiveness of Donald Trump's Twitter campaign in guiding agen-da-setting and deflecting political risk and examined Trump's Twitter communication strategy and explores the communication effects of his tweet content during Covid-19 pandemic. We collected all tweets posted by Trump on the Twitter platform from January 1, 2020 to December 31, 2020.We used Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression analysis with a fixed effects model to analyze the existence of the Twitter strategy. The correlation between the number of con-firmed daily Covid-19 diagnoses and the number of particular thematic tweets was investigated using time series analysis. Empirical analysis revealed Twitter's strategy is used to divert public attention from negative Covid-19 reports during the epidemic, and it posts a powerful political communication effect on Twitter. However, findings suggest that Trump did not use false claims to divert political risk and shape public opinion.