• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer, November 10, 2016

Still reeling from its failure to predict Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, the mainstream news media is now reflecting, with the benefit of hindsight, on the reasons for his success – including social media. His prolific use of social media was undoubtedly part of his successful strategy, but news media still seem to fail to understand why it played such a big role: simply put, because it cut them out of the picture.

While the legacy news media was slanted against Trump from the beginning, Twitter provided the Republican candidate with a platform that allowed him to communicate directly with his followers, circumventing and countering the highly unfavorable coverage and analysis presented by mainstream journalists with his own messages.

Not coincidentally, one of Trump’s favorite themes in his tweets was media bias, as he sought to neutralize damaging stories from a hostile press by casting doubt on reporters’ objectivity. On that note, although some interpreted his constant, rapid-fire responses to unfavorable reporting as evidence of his “thin skin” and narcissism, it was at least as much part or a deliberate strategy to build a counter-narrative symmetrically opposed to the coverage in the news media.

Over time, this essentially created an alternative worldview, free from the framing and filtering that inevitably colored mainstream reporting, which his millions of social media followers faithfully disseminated online. And while news media often dismissed this as a social media “echo chamber,” it’s now clear that the news media was itself trapped in an echo chamber, blinded by inaccurate polls and conventional political wisdom.

There’s no question that Trump’s social media effort was much more engaging than Clinton’s. According to data from analytics firm 4C, cited by the Wall Street Journal, Trump generated 57.9 million social media engagements in the final week of the campaign, compared to 47.7 million for Clinton. And this activity was largely favorable: also per 4C, mentions of Twitter and Facebook in the first week of November were 58% positive for Trump, compared to just 48% for Clinton.