US Presidential Elections on Social Media: Uses and Dependency Model

Introduction

Many people wonder about the role social media plays in the battle of the US presidential elections. The reason for this question is the effective and critical role social media played during the US presidential elections in 2016 AD. Twitter, for example, contributed to enticing many American adults into the electoral battle which affected the results of the presidential elections, as the poorest candidates had a great opportunity to use the available technologies and services on Twitter platform (Shmargad & Sanchez, 2020; Gupta & Aluvalu, 2019; Gupta & Aluvalu, 2021). In 2012 the public's reliance on social media began to increase, most notably on Facebook. According to American opinion polls, 2 out of 5 Americans used Facebook to obtain the most recent information about the US presidential elections, after a few sponsored Facebook pages promoted a candidate before the actual elections (Rainie et al. 2012). Such trends have caused great concern about the role social media, such as Facebook and Twitter; plays in offering misinformation in political campaigns during presidential elections (Garrett & Lee, 2019).

The problem lies in the widespread use of social networks (Iyamu, 2020), even in the Arab countries; fake and misleading news are increasing widely (Allen et al., 2020). This might be difficult for major institutions to control in the presence of fake news and false information, such as the case in the US presidential election in 2016 (Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017). Regarding the extent to which young people in general depend on social media networks to obtain information related to the presidential elections, the study of (Yang & DeHart, 2016) indicated the strong influence social media such as Facebook and Twitter has on political participation and the pursuit of political information. Other studies have also indicated positive relationships between digital media, political participation and knowledge (Dimitrova et al., 2014; Taufiq et al., 2019; Scheufele, 2002; Wei & Lo, 2008). In the Arab world, the Arab Social Media Report series (2017) highlighted the increase of the use of social media within the Arab region, indicating that Facebook is the most utilized social platform among young Arab users. In addition, the Arabic language proved to be the fastest growing language on Twitter, among the 25 different languages on the site, which prompted Twitter to design an Arabic interface. All these studies and results indicate the size of the role digital media plays in influencing its users, especially the cognitive role, which represents one of the most important basic functions of media. According to Holbert (2005, p. 511), mass media becomes important and most powerful to users, especially in democratic societies, during election campaigns or when there is a need to learn about the political issues and programs of some parties (Howard et al. 2011).