SOCIAL MEDIA USE AND THIRD-PARTY CANDIDATES

An Experiment during 2016 U.S Presidential Election

INTRODUCTION METHODS FINDING 1 - Honest FINDING 3 - Interest of Vote

During U.S. presidential elections, much
attention was paid to the social media use of the
candidates of two major parties, while third-party
candidates are seldom observed. This is a crucial
gap to fill because third-party candidates played
important roles in the 2016 U.S. presidential
election and utilized various social media as key
channels of campaign. This study is to provide
social media strategies related to content creation
and platforms selection to politicians who intends
to participate in future presidential election.
An online experiment was conducted from
November 4th to November 8th, 2016.
Design: 2 3 factorial between-group design
(and 1 control group)
Participates: 98 U.S citizens (50% female,
21% male, 2% others)
Process: Pre-test questions Randomly
assigned stimulus Post-test questions
Factorial figure:

Previous studies:
Hong and Nader (2012) & Baxter and Marcella
(2012): showed how levels of social media use
can impact political success, but didnt focus on
third-party candidates.
Lacy and Monson (2002): examined ways to
increase the popularity of a third-party candidate
but failed to discuss the role of social media.
Lee and Hsieh (2013) studied how social media
content may affect voting tendency for third-
party candidates, but they did not compare
different platforms.
People voting for third-party candidates tend
to be more distrustful and cynical towards the
government (Peterson & Wrighton, 1998), and
there indeed exists much attacking content in
campaign ads (De Boer et al., 2012).
HYPOTHESES
H1: Third-party candidates (Jill Stein & Gary
Johnson) will gain 1) significantly higher overall
evaluation, 2) significantly higher score on
positive perception items, and 3) significantly
higher interest of vote for them from people
by attacking mainstream candidates (Donald
Trump & Hillary Clinton) than discussing policy
changes on social media platforms.
H2: There will be significant differences among
the evaluations that third-party candidates gain
from people by attacking mainstream candidates
and discussing policy change on different social
media platforms.
Attack Twitter > Policy Twitter
On Twitter, when candidates post content of
attacking mainstream candidates, they are
regarded as significantly more honest than
posting content of discussing policy changes.
Sample stimulus: FINDING 2 - Capable
Attack Policy Change
Attack Twitter > Policy Instagram
The third-party candidates are regarded to be
significantly more capable when posting content
attacking mainstream candidates on Twitter than
when posting content discussing policy changes
Facebook Twitter on Instagram.
Policy Facebook > Policy Instagram
People tend to vote for the candidate when he/she
posts more about policy than attacking content.
Specifically, talking about policy changes on
Facebook makes people more likely to vote for
the candidate than on Instagram.
CONCLUSION & SUGGESTION
Overall, our findings showed that there is no
significant difference between discussing policy
changes and attacking mainstream candidates on
social media platform overall in terms of peoples
evaluation on third-party candidates. However,
posting different content on different social media
will indeed produce various outcomes. Among the
three social media platforms,
Twitter combing attacking content can become
the most powerful tool to affect peoples
perception about third-party candidates.
Facebook, when used to talk about policy, is
actually the one influence peoples interest of
vote towards the third-party candidates.
Instagram is not powerful enough in presidential
campaign.
In sum, this study suggests that potential
presidential candidates (especially third-party
candidates) could consider the Twitter + Attack
and Facebook + Policy as their social media
strategy to launch their presidential campaigns.

Shixin Cao | Alexandria Criner | Siyang Liu | Yiyan Zhang