L'effetto di Twitter sulle elezioni presidenziali americane: un'analisi del discorso dei tweets di Trump e Biden

Politics is about persuasion, emotion, and it is about communication. As consequence, politics is constructed by and in language and language itself is the currency of politics. Politicians, through choices of words and grammar in text, shape the reality, foregrounding certain kind of ideas and social practices and backgrounding the alternative others, and express a version of truth according to their worldview of reference. Through a discourse analysis of tweets published by Trump and Biden during the last weeks of the 2020 presidential campaign, it is possible to find out what kind of meanings, values and ideologies are hidden within the language. Both Biden and Trump exploited the microblogging platform, Twitter, to capitalize on his functions and reach the most important campaign goals: control the information flow, increase message spread and visibility, and image construction. The Democratic Nominee and the Republican Nominee construct the reality around them with similar strategies in the attempt to cast a positive light on themselves and delegitimise the opponent. To control the information flow and reach a wider audience they used well all Twitter affordances (mention, hashtag, URLs, media content and retweet), while they used the evaluative and legitimization strategies to cast a positive light on themselves and delegitimise the opponent.