 Thanks for being here today. I came to CMS in the fall of 2015 with the intention of making the presidential election the focus of my thesis. And in the most basic sense, that is what I did in the study and what I'll be presenting on today. But if you could have predicted in advance, just how tumultuous, transformative, and for many of us disheartening, the election would end up being. Of course, you can only fit so much into 100 pages in 20 minutes. And so there are huge and important aspects of the election that won't get much mentioned today, including the disturbing rise of fake news, the alleged involvement in the election by foreign actors, and the failure of pollsters to predict the outcome, any of which by themselves could certainly have constituted a thesis. But what I present today nonetheless has implications, I think, at least implicitly for these other questions. In my thesis, I offer an overview of the flows of communication between candidates, voters, and the media over the course of the campaign. In particular, I explained how this new communication ecosystem was especially beneficial to Donald Trump, charismatic candidate purporting to be an outsider who drew on populist and paranoid tropes in his campaign. At the center of his communication strategy, as I will show, is the social network Twitter. And as president, Donald Trump's use of Twitter continues to dominate the news agenda, providing a powerful personal outlet for the most powerful person in the world. Before I turn to the 2016 campaign, I'm going to introduce a concept, paranoid populism, and two figures from 20th century American history who embodied it in their media use. Paranoid populism is the short hand I use, a combination of two related but distinct ideological constructs, populism and political parallel. As we'll see, paranoid populism, as I render it, offers a useful lens through which to view the Trump candidacy, and as a way to understand and even start to explain his success. Although populism in American politics has alluded to a specialized definition, scholars nonetheless agree on several of his characteristics. As his name suggests, populism proposes to advocate for the people, though the truth populists specifically refer to ordinary people, or what Mike Paysing does, a noble assemblage. In fact, it may be more appropriate to refer to not to a group of people, but to a place what Paul Tiger calls the heartland. Populism is defined moreover in its opposition to a selfish coastal elite, unconnected and unconcerned with the plight of the heartland. These appeals to the pure ordinary heartland, in contrast to an elite as cosmopolitan as it is corrupt, it always invariably stowed economic resentment as well as cultural antagonism. Given the subjection to coastal elites, populist movements are typically spearheaded by a figure with outsider credentials, especially someone with charismatic communication abilities who tells it like it is. One final feature typically associated with populism is that it is manifested in the communication strategies of its leaders as a conscious rhetorical project. I thus argue that Donald Trump's use of Twitter as an unfiltered means of communication was the essence of his populist appeal. But populism alone does not fully encapsulate the candidacy of Donald Trump. We also need to consider what I call paranoia, a concept which here should be considered in a political rather than a clinical sense. Richard Hofstahl's influential essay of 1964, The Paranoia Style in American Politics, provides an insightful look at the appeal of this strain of thinking and its impact. Hofstahl's essay, written amidst the rise of far-right Republican candidate Barry Goldwater, pinpoints three characteristics, exaggeration, suspicion and conspiratorial fantasy which he says constitute paranoia. Like populism, paranoia is an ideological construct targeting a certain sense of people, chief among them according to Daniel Pipe's, both politically disaffected and culturally suspicious. Paranoia thinking shares much with populist ideology, not least us versus them mentality, distrustful of elites. Its appeal, like that of populism, can be accentuated by media technology. In 1964, Hofstahl noted that the quote, villains today are much more vivid than those of the Paranoian pre-assessors. Yet the two terms are not entirely overlapping. Politicians famous for their anti-communist paranoia, including Goldwater and Joseph Barney, were not known for populist politics. And McCarthy was spelled by his own lack of charisma. When combined, however, populist ideology and Paranoia thinking can prove powerful, especially when enabled by the media of the day. Two figures from 20th century American history, Charles Coblin and Pat Robertson, both employed Paranoia populist tropes and taxes in their quest to build dedicated audiences on emerging communications platforms, and their stories are therefore constructed. It's possible, Michelle Held Heinz writes, that no single individual had more of an impact on thinking about the radio audience than Charles Coblin. When he was a Catholic priest in 1916, Coblin began a regular radio broadcast in 1926, a time when the medium was in its infancy. His sermons initially focused on narrow religious matters, but became over time almost exclusively political in concept. Coblin employed a wide variety of rhetorical techniques and a folksy way of address to appeal to the man in the street. Coblin's audience was drawn to his coverage of America's deep financial oppression and the blame that he has scrowed for this to the industrial elite as well as to the Roosevelt administration. In so doing, Coblin tapped into a then flexible communication platform around which few norms or laws had been established. He initially enjoyed easy access to his audience through an independent system of radio stations which broadcasts his sermons, meaning, in essence, that if one station objected to his content, he could simply strike a deal with a rival. Coblin's audience peaked at a remarkable $16 million in 1938, giving rise to the possibly a comparable notion that hearing his voice out of every window, you could walk for blocks and never miss a word. If Coblin's large audience would not prove eternal, a combination of religious, political and media elites ultimately conspired to take him off the air. As more radio stations eventually turned against him, the outbreak of the Second World War, which Coblin had vehemently opposed joining, saw new limits placed on quote, controversial public issues, one of the precedents to the Fairness Doctrine, which will be introduced in 1949. Before his fall from grace, Coblin had nonetheless demonstrated the appeal of paranoid populism and its ability to thrive on a new communications platform. At least while political and market conditions were favorable, I looked for regulation to court on. Coblin's experience brings to mind another paranoid populist biobrand, Pat Robinson, who also utilized an emerging medium to build a similarly loyal, if narrow, following. Robinson's Christian Broadcasting Network, launched in 1961, broadcasts programming by satellite, making his religious messaging seemingly descended from the heavens. Robinson's movement set itself against the perceived liberal excesses of the 1960s, appealing to the more traditional values of ordinary folk. In his broadcasts, Robinson seized the mantle of evangelical conspiracy and built on the tradition of Prophecy Theology, which predicted an imminent second coming, prefigured by apostasies, including drugs and devils. This unmediated Christian perspective was made possible through CBN's satellite transmission system, as well as by changes in regulation, which made religious broadcasting technically and economically feasible. CBN was eventually available on 3,000 cable systems, and the number of Americans viewing Bridges programming rose from around 5 million in the late 60s to around 25 million in the mid 80s. Robinson's media success spread political ambitions, but he would ultimately struggle to broaden his base, and he failed to win a single state when he ran in the Republican presidential primary in 1988. Indeed, his audience actually fell by 52% during his presidential run. Amongst other reasons, it seems that his attempts to go mainstream and secure the widest slice of the Republican electorate needed for the nomination caused him into more specific political pronouncements, many at odds with his base. The experiences of Charles Colvin and Pat Robinson differ, but share some characteristics. Both were paranoid populists who exploited emerging media technology before either rivals or regulations would catch up. Those were factors for Colvin's Second World War, and for Robinson the realities of majoritarian politics also eventually hampered their ambitions. But viewed in another way, each had what the other one lacked. Colvin's platform was broad but shaky, ripped from under his feet by regulations and nervous networks. Robinson's audience was deep but narrow, and he was unable to broaden it to encompass the widest way the voters went when he ran for president. It seems then that any paranoid populist seeking prominence and public office needs a hybrid communication stretch, with both a direct, unfiltered platform and the ability to get noticed by a much wider audience, which brings us to Donald Trump. I won't spend much time here rehashing the story of the 2016 presidential election, since it remains obviously fresh in everyone's minds, but it is worth remembering at the outset several of the perceived weaknesses of Trump's candidacy when he started. He was up against 16 other Republican presidential candidates, the largest field in history, which meant that before any votes were even cast, endorsements, fundraising and media attention were in high demand. In terms of both endorsements and fundraising, Trump, with minimal support inside the GOP and little organization, was running well behind. Campaign filings in January 2016, on the eve of the first primaries and after some candidates had already dropped out, showed Trump running only fourth in the fundraising states, while even by the time Trump clinched the nomination in May, he remained disliked in the party, sitting in fourth on rankings of elected Republican officials and endorsements. As you'll see, the metric that Trump did dominate was media attention. In this respect, Trump had several in-built advantages, including decades of experience dealing with the media, primarily tabloid newspapers and his years hosting NBC's Apprentice Show. Trump also had a Twitter account set up in 2009 under the handle of Pat Real Donald Trump, which reached several million followers at the outset of his campaign. And for the past several years, Trump was the informal chief spokesperson of the Bertha Movement, a group which falsely alleged that President Barack Obama had been born outside the United States and was thus ineligible to serve. Trump, in other words, knew how to get attention, in large part by saying and doing outrageous things. And in its early stages, his campaign was treated as a joke, with traditional website 538 writing of his chances and the Huffington Post news website deciding to cover Trump's campaign in its entertainment section. Yet on the trail and on Twitter, Trump's campaign began to gather scene, and it appears that in both domains, Trump embraced the tropes of a paranoid populace in the manner of those he came for. I run the text of all of Trump's tweets through corpus of linguistic software to determine his most common words and phrases. As you might expect, his slogan, Make America Great Again, was one of his favorite hashtags during the primary, as his chart shows, coming up 286 times overall, which accounts for one in every 200 words he tweeted. The phrase perfectly encapsulates the parallel populism as defined earlier, and is evidence that Trump's campaign is deliberately targeting disaffected voters. Many people have responded to the slogan by asking, well, where exactly in Trump's estimation was America great? Trump managed to avoid being pinned down on this question directly during the campaign, but his staunch attacks on the legitimacy and record of Barack Obama, the country's first African American president, are pertinent. By simultaneously alleging that America had seemingly lost its greatness, and by pinpointing the country's first black president as the chief agent in this process of perceived decline, Trump was making a very particular appeal to America's heartland. As noted earlier, by replacing the people per se with the heartland, populace can restrict the scope that their appeal to citizens deemed culturally and racially ordinary. Through his slogan and other campaign pronouncements, Trump tapped a vein of American normalcy, which stretched back centuries, seeking to restrict its scope to the country's heartlands and implicitly then into a particular kind of cultural and racial identity. Turning to the general election against Hillary Clinton, Trump on Twitter defied the traditional migration to the center ground to double down on his parallel populist rhetoric. As this graph shows, make America great again emerged as Trump's top hashtag during the general. His second and third most popular phrases were America first, a phrase of a long history in isolationism contained with anti-Semitism, and drain the swamp, another classically populist, anti-elitist sentiment referring to Washington bureaucrats. Yet in addition to looking at what Trump said, it's also instructive to look at how he used the platform. Trump began the campaign with almost 3 million followers and had earned 13 million by election day, showing quite linear growth in this follow-up campaign. This is an impressive number for any politician not named Barack Obama, and in itself partially explains Trump's prodigious tweeting throughout the campaign. Twitter, though, is a famously messy network, ribbon with bots, trolls and much else, so it is reasonable to assume that Trump was reaching far fewer than the 3 or 13 million voters each time he tweeted. One of the strengths of Twitter, though, is that the potential for amplification is built into its architecture through its retweet functionality. As such, it's actually possible to analyze the amount of wider reach that Trump's tweets received during the campaign. So for each month, I calculated the average number of retweets that each tweet received as shown here. As you can see, the amount of amplification that Trump received in his tweets rose considerably over the course of the campaign, from an average of only 200 retweets at the outset, so over 12,000 forward tweets sent in October 2016 that last month for the campaign. This effect mostly holds even when we control for his rising number of followers across the period. Trump, of course, started the campaign with a base of followers far in excess of the average presidential candidate. This should disapuse any notion that Trump led a campaign from the virtual grassroots. He has in fact enjoyed high levels of name recognition for many years, but what he did do was utilize his existing following into a source of much wider exposure for the paranoid populist messaging he employed, both on Twitter and beyond. And yet, as Trump appears to have ensured it, reaching several million followers or even several million more through retweets wasn't enough, he also needed to establish as much exposure as possible in the mainstream media. Another part of Twitter's architecture is the app reply, which links your own tweet to the account of somebody else while using the app key. As this chart shows, in the most common use of root app replies, Trump sought attention from predominantly media sources, with a couple of strange exceptions. In the primary, this mostly meant the at least somewhat sympathetic to his campaign, Fox News Channel. In the general election, however, Trump's media diet appears to have evolved to include central sources like CNN and the New York Times. Yet to a greater extent than in the primary, Trump's references to the media are around more than simply increasing his exposure. Of his 38 references to the Times, for example, fully 25 were to quote, were to be quote, failing New York Times. This suggests an evolution in Trump's strategy. Trump's tweets during the general election seemed to have had less to do with highlighting his media experiences and more media appearances and more to do with objecting to unfavorable coverage by seeking to delegitimize the organizations providing it. Thus, Trump used Twitter to both deploy paranoid populist tropes and target media sources, seeking both attention and retribution for perceived criticism. It seems to evoke something of a hybrid strategy, sloping the small but committed base of followers through a direct, unmediated, slow of messages and reaching out, however angrily, to try to gain a foothold in the mainstream media. For those whom Trump was reaching directly through his Twitter account, media exposure presumably did not affect their support not one way or the other. But for the larger bulk of prospective voters whose support is sought, Trump required even other support of them than at least an interested mainstream media. Of course, Trump was not the first candidate ever to seek media exposure. For decades, campaigns have tried to find cheap and efficient ways to get through the media's gaking process, which restricts the flow of information to the public. In the past, everything from press releases to photo ops have been used by campaigns to try to seize the media spotlight. If it works, this can result in free media, as opposed to expensive TV ads. Another theory of theoretical concept is useful here for thinking about how the media covers news. In a book about the Vietnam War, Daniel Hallam introduced three spheres of political discourse in America. First, there is a sphere of consensus, apple pie issues, about which most everyone agrees, and for which an opposing viewpoint does not need to be presented. The second sphere is that of legitimate controversy. This contains issues reasonably disagreed about, such as whether marijuana should be legal. The third sphere is a sphere of deviance, issues so outside the mainstream that journalists condemn them, such as hangers crime, and points for anyone who gets the Kennedy reference. Yet there are two counter-intuitive things to consider about Hallam's spheres. First, they are permeable. Issues can move between them over time, consider, for example, attitudes towards women's suffrage between the 19th century and today. And second, studies show that journalists disproportionately choose to cover deviance even as they condemn it. Over the course of the campaign, Donald Trump made nearly a deviant statement. In many cases, there were no shortage of people decrying them as abnormal or wrong. But it is also true that the sheer interest in Trump's campaign often outweigh concerns about condemnation. In an interview at Harvard on the eve of the election, CNN president Jeff Zucker expressed regret for the hours upon hours of live, unfiltered footage of Trump's rallies that his network broadcast. Of course, this coverage was an enormous ratings hit, an enormous consideration which undoubtedly contributed to the network's decisions. But without a filter of condemnation, this coverage served to normalise and even partly legitimise Trump's candidacy. My analysis suggests that Trump's deviance on Twitter meant his account was also over covered with respect to other candidates. Finally researched by queried media cloud, database developed by MIT's Center for Civic Media, for the Twitter handles of each of the Republican candidates over the course of the primary. As this graph shows, even the mainstream media references to real Donald Trump were far in excess to the Twitter handles of his rivals who barely get looking. Of course, correlation between Trump's deviance and the disproportionate coverage his tweets got doesn't prove a causal relationship. And many of these references to Trump's Twitter were presumably condemning him. But it nevertheless says a lot that Trump's paranoid populist tweeting received so much mainstream coverage during the primary election, a time when media attention contributed considerably to a candidate's viability. And so what have I shown today? First, the Trump's campaign contained many of the paranoid populist tropes of his ideological forebears, and that much of this ideology manifested itself in his communication strategy which was abnormally focused on Twitter. Second, and related, the Twitter offered Trump a direct unfiltered line to his base committed supporters, sending messages which were amplified by them through the network. And finally the Trump who baked familiar attention, even his eaves smirked the outlets which provided it, succeeded in getting through the gatekeepers in large part because of the deviance of his paranoid populist stances. Thus Trump needed the loyal following, melded the loyal following of Pat Robertson with a broad appeal of Father Coglan to become America's first paranoid populist president. Every election is decided by a myriad of factors, but in the case of 2016, my research suggests that without Admiral Donald Trump, we wouldn't have President Donald Trump. Thanks for listening, I've welcome your questions and if you want to discuss this any further later, I'm on Twitter. So that's a really like idea on this paper. My question is kind of about, you presented a very like nice and tidy line of the paranoid populist style in relationship to new media forms and you're tracing from radio to satellite to even Twitter. And I guess I'm just wondering why should we be convinced of the importance of Twitter specifically in the campaign? It's a nice, maybe, I'm feeling like it's a little bit too neat. In other words, if we could imagine a Donald Trump campaign without Twitter, we could say, you know, the primary amplifier of his paranoid populist rhetorical tropes was Fox News or even satellite radio still. But we might think about what he was saying as a, you know, an intentionally crossing media strategy where he's very aware of the way he's going to be covered by mainstream media first and Twitter is playing some type of role but not necessarily, yeah, so why should we be convinced that it's a central element? And part of that question is about the very low use of Twitter among the broader population and I don't know but I'm curious if you look at sort of Twitter use rates among the Trump supporters versus others and if Twitter is something that's used by a younger, wealthier and more coastal demographic that may have shifted because of this, so talk about that a little bit. Sure, yeah, that's absolutely right and I'm definitely clear about the fact that Trump's strategy was across media, right, so certainly he was being visited by the top radio. The Fox News example is a little more complicated because of what's happening around Kelly and for a while it looked like they were going to not cover him as favorably as he or look at him at all as he liked. So I think the emphasis on Twitter, while definitely a little too tidy, is just to emphasize the unmediated quality of that. I think that's something which both Colin and Robertson, while they had their audiences in place, were able to exploit, Colin could basically say whatever he wanted while he was giving a sense of eventually if he then got kind of tripped up by that. And so I think Twitter is, if not unique at least, very interesting and instrumental as far as it was a very unmediated one to this following. And even if it wasn't always the sole focus of the voters themselves, they were being fed a lot of this stuff via the media to vote. So a lot of it in eminence and put it in that it certainly wasn't the end of the platform he was using. Yeah, I mean I think another way to think about what Sasha's pointing to is that we assume that the value of Twitter is that Trump reached all his supporters directly every day in millions of them, right? But if the reality is that we'll actually be just more educated way of class, people, whatever. It doesn't matter because those people run Fox News and CNN and so on. And so that you can say that Twitter's value seems to be reaching a mass audience directly. But its value really may be just being able to shape the news events every day and seizing the news cycle. Yeah, and that's going to be kind of major implications of this. I think Trump as a candidate was fascinating as a subject of study. Now I think it's kind of imperative as Trump as president, particularly given that he can go online and tweet and say kind of set the news agenda today. Agenda setting is a phrase that I couldn't find room for in this presentation, but certainly appears in my thesis. And I think I tried to elucidate that as you say, kind of two-step flow between candidate to media to voters. Of course, there are several arrows missing from this overview. There's an arrow from voters to Twitter, which is really important. There's an arrow from the media to Trump. And indeed, one of the really interesting things now is do we have an echo chamber between what Fox News wants to talk about and what Trump tweets about and what Fox News reports about. Which is, if anything, scary and war-worrying. But in terms of the campaign being friction with Fox News, there's a reason to think about why Twitter, clock Twitter, is really important. Yeah, I mean, just briefly, just hypothesizing a lot already on both Sasha and Heather said, I mean, maybe Twitter was actually his unmediated line to the media in the sense that, as you mentioned, like he was originally running a very lean campaign, right? He didn't have a lot of money. They weren't running a lot of ads. And, you know, this in conjunction with his calls and, you know, CNN coverage and all that might have been looked for very smart, like, business decision to reach directly to influencers and media outlets who he knew would reliably amplify the message to his base. Yeah, absolutely right. There was a fallout. At times when Fox News wasn't running on the air or CNN to this is particularly nasty, that seemed to be the place where he went. And it seemed to do a useful job in allowing him to reset the terms of the agenda. Okay, do you have any? Yeah, potential. And how we, could you repeat the question to the light? Yeah, sure. The question is basically, do we need to think about, and if so, how should we think about using Twitter as a regulator Twitter to try and sort of prevent some of this stuff? You know, I think really the responsibility probably falls on the journalists because the instrumental control they've talked about. I think taking, you know, I think if, I think Trump now, possibly Trump in 2015, certainly Trump now is powerful enough that if Jack Dorsey decided to ban him, then there would be, you know, he would have simply set up his own sort of platform. He would find them now, he would find, be able to find an unmediated way to talk to the public. So I think kind of kicking off Twitter as satisfying as that would be, probably wouldn't achieve too much. But I think certainly journalists and others can, including all of us, have kind of been able to reach me something to find maybe interesting, but not, I don't think we really agree with, you know, everyone has to think about the tiny effect which adds up to the big effect of amplification that we all can do. And journalists at the tip of their eyes a little bit, they'll all participate in that process. Thank you. Technology against technocracy. Well Maya, setting up, Josh, can you say something about Breitbart news and banning and to like, you know, the media cloud team recently did an analysis of the Trump media sphere.