Social Media in Politic: Political Campaign on United States Election 2020 Between Donald Trump and Joe Biden

Abstract

This research analyzes social media Twitter as a candidate campaign tool in the 2020 United States presidential election. Social media accounts studied include Republican candidate Donald Trump and Democratic candidate Joe Biden. The campaign issues seen in this research are political issues and racial issues. Twitter is one of the most used social media platforms. The number of Twitter users in the United States reaches 68.7 million and is the most significant number of users worldwide. This illustrates Twitter’s strategic role in shaping a new commu nication model for disseminating information in the United States. This study uses the Qualitative Data Software Analysis (QDSA) method with the NVIVO tool. Nvivo is an analytical tool that reads text and content on Twitter accounts (Kaefer et al., 2015). This study shows that Twitter as a campaign tool has a character that is influenced by the type of content and intensity generated from the account of each candidate. On Donald Trump’s account, we find political issues that characterize Twitter activity, such as the hashtags #MAGA, #VOTE, #SCOTUS, and #Obam agate. Race problems were not found. Joe Biden’s account found several tweets related to political issues tagged with multiple hashtags, namely #DemConvention, #DemDebate, and #BidenTownHall. Some hashtags can be categorized in case of race, such as #NationalBlackVoterDay, # WomenEqualityDay, and #BlackHisto ryMonth. Apart from that, the themes and sentiments that the account generates are also discussed.