Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

His credibility is zero, but by attacking political correctness he projects a true voice to his internet followers

In most ways, Donald Trump has taken poor advantage of the Net. He has not used it for organizing and spreading a movement the way the Occupy Wall Street or Arab Spring did. He has not used it to raise essential funding for his campaign, as Bernie Sanders does. He has not used it to build community among his supporters as presidential candidates since Howard Dean in 2004 have.

He has not even used it as the primary vehicle for getting his message out, relying instead on the countless hours of coverage broadcast media have provided for free — although he’s obviously no slouch at social media. But despite these missed opportunities, Donald Trump has utterly excelled in one single aspect of the Net. Leveraging — and perverting — one of its key values: Authentic speech.

Speech on the Net sounds very different than the voice of old media. When I was growing up, the media’s authoritative voice had the same accent. It was professionally enunciated, often presented as neutral and stripped of personal belief, always calm, and overwhelmingly male. Then the Internet liberated our voices, training us to expect people to speak for and as themselves, with all their idiosyncrasies and imperfections.

Trump’s voice is indeed authentic in that sense. After all, he is the first major candidate for the presidency of the United States who clearly writes his own tweets. Hillary Clinton (whom I support) tweets out carefully prepared campaign points that seem obviously to have been written by her staff — especially when the tweets are dispatched while Clinton is making a point in a live debate. Donald, on the other hand, just says whatever is crossing his mind at that moment, much of which is nasty, degrading, and untrue. The lack of a filter, the weird punctuation, the very clumsiness of its expression makes Trump’s Internet speech seem much more authentic than Clinton’s....