Through the 20th century presidents have used communication tools to create and manage an image that he hopes will boost political support for him, his administration and its policies. This building of image through communication tools has been vital to the presidency because it allows the president to build public acceptance and generate public consent when making decisions that could affect the country or the world. However, communication tools between the president and the public are designed to craft a relationship between the president and potential supporters, and in seeking to craft a relationship are managed by the Presidential staff so that communication tools present the President to the public in the most favourable light.

In the late 1990s the world wide web started to become the media platform that was most central in people’s lives. The Internet fundamentally transformed political communications. Websites dedicated to forums of political conversations between diverse sets of people eventually gave way to web-based political conversations between people of similar or indeed identical political views. At the same time, conversations could be carried out in real time but on a much bigger geographical scale: the state or indeed the country. Finally, the quantity of information of all stripes exploded; the sheer volume was historically unprecedented. The creation of Facebook in 2004 in turn served to change the character of the world wide web by introducing the world to social media, which has become the most important means by which people connect to each other, including when it comes to matters of politics.

The Internet age has created an entirely new platform for presidential policy communications and has changed the relationship between the president and the American people. As I have sought to argue, early presidents sought to directly communicate with the American people. Using social media, “a President can communicate his thoughts at any time, on any subject, without the vetting process traditionally used by, to on