The Digital Architectures of Social Media: Comparing Political Campaigning on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat in the 2016 U.S. Election

By Michael Bossetta. arXiv.org, 2018

539 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The present study argues that political communication on social media is mediated by a platform’s digital architecture—the technical protocols that enable, constrain, and shape user behavior in a virtual space. A framework for understanding digital architectures is introduced, and four platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat) are compared along the typology. Using the 2016 U.S. election as a case, interviews with three Republican digital strategists are combined with social media data to qualify the study’s theoretical claim that a platform’s network structure, functionality, algorithmic filtering, and datafication model affect political campaign strategy on social media.

Subfields: Communication, Sociology and Political Science, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c5592f346d2943637096af7fc5a4c63a72a40c50

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Communication

1. Jay J. Van Bavel
2. Elizabeth Harris
3. Joshua A. Tucker

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Jay J. Van Bavel
2. Elizabeth Harris
3. Joshua A. Tucker
4. Mark A. Kayser
5. Michael Peress

Citations in the corpus

• Political Polarization on the Digital Sphere: A Cross-platform, Over-time Analysis of Interactional, Positional, and Affective Polarization on Social Media (2020, background): “Moreover, publicly open discussions on Facebook in general, and public pages in particular often exist as instruments of political activism (Bossetta, 2018; Harlow & Harp, 2012) – and other users respond to it as such.”
• Political Psychology in the Digital (mis)Information age: A Model of News Belief and Sharing (2020, background): “2) Platform Affordances: Social media platforms differ not only in terms of their audience, but also in terms of the media format by which information is shared (Bossetta, 2018; Kreiss, Lawrence, and McGregor 2018; Debit, Birnholtz, and Hancock 2017).”