LAUSR

gather information about politics, and that online engagement is positively correlated with offline political activity. In Chapter 8, David Morris leverages an experiment to argue that audiences regard campaign messages from Twitter to be as credible as those coming from mainstream media outlets. While a disheartening finding, this conclusion may be due the fact that Morris attributes the campaign message to “a nationally-known Clinton [Trump] political supporter” (p. 185) in both the Twitter and mainstream media conditions. Though Peter Francia avoids using causal language in Chapter 9, he cites Trump’s ability to garner free media attention and his attacks on the credibility of those who would criticize his behavior as reasons for his November victory. The section closes with Jody Baumgartner’s Chapter 10 examination of how late night political comedy has migrated from television to YouTube. The final three chapters of the volume form Part III are titled “Political Issues on Twitter and Instagram.” Chapters 11 (authored by Bethany Conway-Silva, Christine R. Filer, Kate Kenski, and Eric Tstsi) and 12 (by Terri Towner and Caroline Lego Muñoz) investigate the relationship between agenda-building and campaigns’ use of Twitter and Instagram, respectively. The book closes with more attention on Instagram, as Mark Ludwig investigates how Democratic and Republican candidates use this under-studied platform. Overall, the volume provides a wealth of data that illuminates how political actors and voters used the Internet (especially social media) during the 2016 campaign. The abundance of descriptive information is the volume’s biggest strength, but also its biggest weakness. Many of the chapters present data with no clear theory or expectations. Purely descriptive studies have value, of course, but the reader may come away from some chapters with little sense of the bigger picture. Rarely do the authors compare 2016 to previous campaigns, so the ability to contextualize the volume’s findings is limited. Even so, The Internet and the 2016 Presidential Campaign may prove to be a valuable reference for those wishing to dig deeper into 2016’s results or those interested in the growing importance of social media to political campaigns.