A Study On Visual Picture Framing And Discourse Strategy Of Trump's Twitter From The Perspective Of The Theory Of Framing

The emergence of social media changed the production of information and communication pattern,which generated deep influences of countries' politics and society.It has already overturned the predominance of traditional media in political communication,providing a powerful tool for citizens to participate political activities and express their appeal.On this background,several social campaigns which started from social media platform have wreaked havoc in real world,such as Arab Spring,Sunflower Movement,Umbrella Movement,etc.All of these events were successful organized by single individual's positive expression and showed the world the mighty power of social media,while the president of the United States,Donald Trump won the election by utilizing negative expression,which became an eye opener.The 2016 presidential Election of the United States were concluded with the triumph of Donald Trump who has tweeted countless astonishing words.This real estate tycoon who has no political experience has released a variety of radical speeches.During the primary election,Washington Post,the New York Times and other mainstream media in the United States put Trump's news in entertainment section and Trump also became a fun topic of conservation.But his support rate roared and eventually he won the election,which shocked all mainstream media.His success is called “Trump phenomenon”,becoming an exception which contradicted traditional idea of successful communication.After Trump released a huge amount of racial discrimination comments,he has been attacked by the media and unfavored by the public.Under this circumstance,how he take advantage of Twitter to reverse the disadvantages and won the election,becoming the president,is worth to be studied.Some scholars see Trump as a master of manipulating media and public opinion.With the help of Twitter and other social media platform,he won the election by his own communication and language strategies.Based on framing theory and discourse analysis,this research tries to analyze Donald Trump's Twitter content during the period when he became the nominee of Republican party and the day before the voting day of 2016 US president election through Python computer language technology.In order to improve quantitative research methods in content analysis research,Python computer language was adopted in this thesis.With this method,researchers do not need huge amount of manpower and can avoid subjective factors of coders affecting reliability and research results.In social media consensus quantitative research,the reliability and validity of research results can be improved.The findings show that the form of information carrier affects Trump's Twitter communication effect.Averagely,under the same framing dimension,for the tweets which are about support,endorsement,attack,moral image,appeal and policies,visual form can cause more sharing and achieve better communication effect than pure texts.Compared with visual form tweets,pure texts form can cause Trump's twitter followers generate more comments and interaction.Among pure texts Twitter content,the content which have specific facts draw more attention and create more interaction than those tweets which have no facts.Trump used dark color photos to describe Hilary and use bright color photos to describe himself so as to achieve visual framing effect.The number of the words in each tweet has no influence on the communication effect.As to discourse strategy,Trump uses short words,taking advantage of data,and facts to show the differences between his competitor and him so as to create controversy and achieve ideal communication effect.