Silent Majority or Vocal Minority: A Corpus-Assisted Discourse Study of Trump Supporters’ Facebook Communication

Abstract

The topic of immigration remains contentious in American political debate, and it played a prominent role in the presidential campaign of 2016, being exploited by presidential candidate Donald J. Trump. His proposal to ban Muslims from entering the USA stimulated passionate discussions, including those on social networks. The material for the investigation was collected from Trump’s official Facebook page and was analyzed by Critical Discourse Analysis and Corpus Linguistic methods. The results were compared to the data from the COCA corpus as an indication of the general Americans’ attitude toward Muslims. The results demonstrate a difference in the negativity level between Trump’s supporters and the broader American public and provide a window into the ideology of the section of the US population supporting Trump.Publisher’s Note: This article was originally published with an incorrect peer review statement, which said that this article was an internally reviewed editorial. This has now been amended to reflect the fact that this is a piece of research that underwent double blind peer review by two external reviewers.