Obama’s rhetoric in the war on terror: the presidential use of social networks in the case of April 2013 Boston attacks.

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to study two aspects of the US president Barack Obama’s rhetoric on the April 2013 Boston attacks: the first one, the arguments in the public remarks and speeches he gave after the attacks; the second one, the use of his Twitter account on the days after the explosions. The research has been done trough the textual content analysis of Obama’s addresses and tweets and it has resulted in at least three noteworthy conclusions: first, Obama’s rhetoric on the attacks presents the main characteristics of the US presidential rhetoric on the war on terror, not only in depicting the enemy but especially in presenting the US and the American society; second, after studying how these arguments are translated to the social media and specifically to Twitter, we see that the use of Twitter is merely limited to the reproduction of textual sentences that the president had already said; therefore, in this case social media is used as a mere disseminator of information already given to the public through mainstream media; third, the main use of Twitter by the president in the days following the attacks aimed to mobilize and encourage his followers to take active action on a substantially different political cause: in this case, the campaign for a stricter gun control.