What are they saying? Discussion surrounding the Republican National Convention.

 What are they saying?
Discussion Surrounding The Republican National Convention

by: Raine Riley, August 29, 2020

It is election year, and that means that we will be seeing more gatherings, rallies, political advertisements, and information sharing on all of our social feeds. These last two weeks, however, have held two of the largest events of any election year, the Democratic and Republican National Conventions, respectively. The Republican National Convention, or RNC, attracted a lot of attention across the United States and the world as the current president accepted the Republican incumbent nomination. The surge in social media posts around the world discussing convention prompted an analysis of the conversation, examining 14 unique platforms over a six-day period.

There were over 6.8 million posts across all social platforms including Twitter, YouTube, and TikTok between August 23 and August 28, 2020. The number of posts peaked on Tuesday, August 25, the day after the first night of the Republican National Convention, but remained relatively high throughout the rest of the week.

One of the biggest discussions across social media platforms was the prevalence of fear-talk at the RNC. While many people found the use of fear-talk problematic, some supporters found it to be quite effective and positive. One of the most influential posts regarding fear-talk at the RNC was @thedailyshow’s TikTok featuring Trevor Noah’s “watching the RNC like:” point-of-view video. The video, with caption “the RNC will leave you terrified and really f**king confused,” had the highest follower impressions, with 1.7 million followers and over 216k views.

The overall sentiment across the web represented many voices – some who support the RNC and President Trump and others who strongly oppose the two. The majority of posts on TikTok, however, were negative towards the RNC, with many of them fact-checking its speakers. Fact-checking was a prominent topic across all platforms, along with many criticisms that RNC speakers were sharing false information. The speakers themselves also fell under criticism, specifically due to the fact that many speakers were part of Donald Trump’s family. Some supporters, however, pointed out that other speakers at the convention were “regular people” as opposed to the various celebrities that spoke at and attended the Democratic National Convention.

COVID-19 was not discussed nearly as much as may have been expected across social media, other than various critiques about holding large gatherings without requiring masks and social distancing. Some people brought up the number of people who died due to COVID-19 during the RNC, bringing up that each night of the convention more people lost their lives to COVID-19 than during the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

Black Lives Matter, or BLM, was barely mentioned at all until the final evening, August 27, when protestors posted themselves outside of the White House during Trump’s acceptance speech. Critics mentioned that BLM was not really discussed at the convention other than when the protests were shown to induce fear. Supporters pointed out violent protestors, namely a few outside of the White House that some convention-goers had to be protected from after Trump’s speech.

While there were many posts across social media during this timeframe discussing the Republican National Convention, and many voices were represented, the majority of the conversation aired on neutral or negative. Many neutral posts shared information about viewership or were international news agencies sharing information on the convention, while negative posts across all platforms focused mainly on pointing out misinformation, fear-talk, and sharing general disapproval of Donald Trump and the republican party.