The international collaborative research group of the University of Tokyo, Toyohashi University of Technology, and City University of Hong Kong, led by Professor Fujio Toriumi of the University of Tokyo, said that conservative tweets are more liberal in Japan regarding political communication on social media. It was revealed that it reached the middle class, which is more moderate than the tweet.
Political communication on social media tends to occur among partisan homogenous people, but some of the messages from partisan clusters flow into the middle class, affecting their opinions and actions. To exert.Until now, it was unclear how far such messages reached the middle class.
This time, the research group analyzed more than 1 million tweets about former Prime Minister Abe (tweets containing "Abe" or "Abe").As a result, conservative and liberal clusters do not differ much in their internal network structure, but conservatives are more likely than liberals to follow back when followed by the middle class. It was found that when the conservatives followed the middle class, they were more likely to receive follow-up returns from the middle class than when the liberals followed the middle class.
Furthermore, regarding the characteristic vocabulary used in tweets, conservatives contain more emotional words such as "disgust" than liberals, and "interesting" and "yaba". The use of colloquial adjectives such as "yoki" was similar to that of the middle class.These tweet characteristics may contribute to the connection between the conservatives and the middle class.
In order for liberals to compete, it will be necessary to aim for communication that is easy for the middle class to accept.In the future, he wants to clarify the impact of partisan asymmetry on social media on voting behavior in elections.
Paper information:[Scientific Reports] Japanese conservative messages propagate to moderate users better than their liberal counterparts on Twitter
