#TrumpenMexico. Transnational connective action on Twitter and the border wall dispute

Abstract

This article aims to identify how digital public opinion was articulated on Twitter during the visit of the Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump to Mexico City in 2016 by invitation from the Mexican government, which was preceded by the threat to construct a border wall that Mexico would pay for. Using a mixed methodology made up of computational methods such as data mining and social network analysis combined with content analysis, the authors identify conversational patterns and the structures of the net-works formed, beginning with this event involving the foreign policy of both countries that share a long border. The authors study the digital media practices and emotional frameworks these social network users employed to involve themselves in the controversial visit, marked by complex political, cultural and historical relations. The analysis of 352,203 tweets in two languages (English and Spanish), those most used in the conversations, opened the door to an understanding as to how transnational public opinion is articulated in connective actions detonated by newsworthy events in distinct cultural contexts, as well as the emotional frameworks that permeated the conversation, whose palpable differences show that Twitter is not a homogeneous universe, but rather a set of universes co-determined by sociocultural context..