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Full-Text Articles in Mass Communication

21st Century Propaganda: The Age Of Twitter, Holly Thayer Jul 2018

21st Century Propaganda: The Age Of Twitter, Holly Thayer

Honors College Theses

Twitter is a new platform in which politics and social engagement has found a home. Due to this a new medium to propagate a message has emerged that is unlike traditional platforms of propaganda. I hypothesize that traditional tactics of analyzing propaganda are no longer sufficient. I conducted an 8 week study cataloguing tweets that contained either the hashtag #falseflag or #hoax that were based on current topics in the United States. In total I retrieved 128 tweets. I first analyzed these tweets through the seven traditional tactics of propaganda and found that they were only present in 51% of …


The Alt-Right's Use Of President Donald Trump's Twitter Account As A Propaganda Device, Erin Nicole Jorden Jan 2018

The Alt-Right's Use Of President Donald Trump's Twitter Account As A Propaganda Device, Erin Nicole Jorden

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

The long campaign to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act situated President Donald J. Trump in a context where attacks on President Barack Obama’s signature legislation symbolized a broader repudiation of his legacy. Even more than mainstream Republican partisans, the altright blogosphere celebrated the demise of the law to symbolically cleanse the nation of Obama’s influence. Trump attempted to honor his pledge to end Obamacare in his first year of office with his support of the American Health Care Act (March 2017), Better Care Reconciliation Act (July 2017), and the Graham-Cassidy Bill (September 2017). Members of the alt-right reframed …


Effects Of Humor Use By Brands And Their Parody Accounts On Twitter, Nick Eckman Jan 2018

Effects Of Humor Use By Brands And Their Parody Accounts On Twitter, Nick Eckman

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

This study examines the impact of humor use by brands and brand parody accounts on Twitter. Specifically, this research investigates how the type of humorous message and the message source influence perceptions of the brand, behavioral intentions toward the brand, and perceived parasocial interaction with the brand. It also examines the relationship between gender and perceptions of humor. Accordingly, this study uses a 2 (humor: wordplay vs. disparagement) x 2 (source: brand account vs. parody account) between-subjects online experiment to answer these questions. Key results suggest that parody Twitter accounts, particularly those using disparagement-style humor, may be advantageous to the …