The Digital Architectures of Social Media: Comparing Political Campaigning on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat in the 2016 U.S. Election
This research addresses how social media platforms affect political communication, offering insights for campaign strategists and researchers, though it is incremental in applying an existing framework to a new case.
The study examined how the digital architectures of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat influenced political campaigning during the 2016 U.S. election, finding that platform-specific features like network structure and algorithmic filtering shape campaign strategies.
The present study argues that political communication on social media is mediated by a platform's digital architecture, defined as 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 US election as a case, interviews with three Republican digital strategists are combined with social media data to qualify the studyies theoretical claim that a platform's network structure, functionality, algorithmic filtering, and datafication model affect political campaign strategy on social media.