Political communication and multimodality: the Facebook pages of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump

This paper will analyze the strategies used by Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump, the two frontrunners of the Democrat and Republican nominations for the 2016 US Presidential Elections, in their online campaign, and specifically in their official Facebook pages. My research will address a key concept in social media, that is, multimodality, and how the two candidates have employed multi-semiotic features in their Facebook “posts” in order to boost support among supporters as well as potential voters. Nowadays, the impact of political communication through social media has superseded that of traditional media. Facebook, in particular, has become so important as a major instrument of political propaganda and information that, according to media observers, it is going to be the most influential media platform in the upcoming 2016 US Presidential elections. Indeed, campaign strategists know that candidates can gain visibility only by using the technical features available in Facebook, and these features are quintessentially multimodal. The environment itself of digital media, and particularly of Web 2.0, is characterized by multimodality, that is, the convergence of different modes – language, videos, photos – in a single text. Expanding on the work of Kress, Hodge and Jewitt as well as on that of Fairclough, this paper will discuss how the different use of multimodality in Clinton’s and Trump’s Facebook pages is informed by diverging ideological agendas. The nature of the convergence of language, images and videos and the orchestration of meaning through the configuration of modes made by Clinton’s and Trump’s electoral teams reveal the different social and cultural priorities of the two candidates as well as those of the two highly polarized discourse communities whom they address.