The influence of social media on this year‘s presidential elections

[User200010]

Hello, I've been assigned an essay to analyze the influence of social media, particularly Twitter, now X, on this year's presidential elections. We have clear guidelines. In the introduction, we have to present the problem. In the main body, we have to expand on hypotheses, review literature, compare viewpoints and evaluate results. In the coclusion, we have to answer the research question and solutions or insights for the future. Overall, we have a 15-page limit.

Right now, I'm struggling with the analysis part. It seems there isn't enough material for analysis yet, and I'm unsure about which sources to focus on. To put it frankly, I do not know what I could analyse. 

I've considered analyzing news articles or speeches of politicians, and comparing them, because I do not think that there is much to say about the few tweets of politicians made this year. However, I don’t really know which speeches/articles I could use for that… I thought about doing a quantitative analysis, and searching for some program which could help me to find out for example which words or expressions have been used the most by one or two prominent politicians. I have heard about a qualitative analysis too, as I found some political discourse analysis or case study online, but I don‘t really know how to write something like that, or again, which material I could even use…

Any suggestions for materials or methods for the analyzing part would be greatly appreciated!

[Frank Knight]

Something simple you could do is do a simple survey where you ask people about their social media use and vote intention. Are people who use TikTok more likely to vote for Biden? You could probably field the survey among your peers to keep it simple.