Abstract
In modern election campaigns, political parties utilize social media to advertise their policies and candidates and to communicate to electorates. In Japan’s latest general election in 2017, the 48th general election for the Lower House, social media, especially Twitter, was actively used. In this paper, we perform a detailed analysis of social graphs and users who retweeted tweets of political parties during the election. Our aim is to obtain accurate information regarding the diffusion power for each party rather than just the number of followers. The results indicate that a user following a user who follows a political party account tended to also follow the account. This means that it does not increase diversity because users who follow each other tend to share similar values. We also find that followers of a specific party frequently retweeted the tweets. However, since users following the user who follow a political party account are not diverse, political parties delivered the information only to a few political detachment users.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Bloomberg (2017): A 3-Day-Old Japanese Political Party Has Already Overtaken Abe’s on Twitter.
- 3.
The Lower House in Japan was dissolved on this day.
- 4.
We constantly searched by query “RT lang:ja”.
References
Adamic, L.A., Glance, N.: The political blogosphere and the 2004 U.S. election: divided they blog. In: Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Link Discovery, pp. 36–43 (2005)
Bakshy, E., Hofman, J.M., Mason, W.A., Watts, D.J.: Everyone’s an influencer: quantifying influence on Twitter. In: Proceedings of the Fourth ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining, pp. 65–74 (2011)
Barberá, P., Jost, J.T., Nagler, J., Tucker, J.A., Bonneau, R.: Tweeting from left to right: is online political communication more than an echo chamber? Psychol. Sci. 26(10), 1531–1542 (2015)
Batorski, D., Grzywińska, I.: Three dimensions of the public sphere on Facebook. Inf. Commun. Soc. 21(3), 356–374 (2018)
Cha, M., Haddadi, H., Benevenuto, F., Gummadi, K.P.: Measuring user influence in Twitter: the million follower fallacy. In: Proceedings of the Fourth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, pp. 10–17 (2010)
Comarela, G., Crovella, M., Almeida, V., Benevenuto, F.: Understanding factors that affect response rates in Twitter. In: Proceedings of the 23rd ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media, pp. 123–132 (2012)
Dahlgren, P.: The internet, public spheres, and political communication: dispersion and deliberation. Polit. Commun. 22(2), 147–162 (2005)
Hayat, T., Samuel-Azran, T.: “You too, Second Screeners?” Second screeners’ echo chambers during the 2016 U.S. elections primaries. J. Broadcast. Electron. Media 61(2), 291–308 (2017)
Hyun, K.D., Moon, S.J.: News media’s role in the issue-voting process: news attention, issue proximity, and vote choice. Journalism Mass Commun. Q. 91(4), 687–705 (2014)
Iyengar, S., Hahn, K.S.: Red media, blue media: evidence of ideological selectivity in media use. J. Commun. 59(1), 19–39 (2009)
Rodriguez, M.G., Gummadi, K., Schoelkopf, B.: Quantifying information overload in social media and its impact on social contagions. In: Proceedings of the Eighth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, pp. 170–179 (2014)
Stringhini, G., et al.: Follow the green: growth and dynamics in Twitter follower markets. In: Proceedings of the 2013 Internet Measurement Conference, pp. 163–176 (2013)
Tumasjan, A., Sprenger, T., Sandner, P., Welpe, I.: Predicting elections with Twitter: what 140 characters reveal about political sentiment. In: Proceedings of the Fourth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, pp. 178–185 (2010)
Williams, H.T., McMurray, J.R., Kurz, T., Hugo Lambert, F.: Network analysis reveals open forums and echo chambers in social media discussions of climate change. Global Environ. Change 32, 126–138 (2015)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Yoshida, M., Toriumi, F. (2018). Information Diffusion Power of Political Party Twitter Accounts During Japan’s 2017 Election. In: Staab, S., Koltsova, O., Ignatov, D. (eds) Social Informatics. SocInfo 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11186. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01159-8_32
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01159-8_32
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-01158-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-01159-8
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)