Information Diffusion Power of Political Party Twitter Accounts During Japan's 2017 Election

TL;DR

This study analyzes Twitter's role in Japan's 2017 election, revealing that political parties' retweet diffusion mainly reaches similar-minded users, limiting information diversity.

Contribution

It provides a detailed social graph analysis to measure the true diffusion power of political parties on Twitter, beyond follower counts.

Findings

Users following each other tend to share similar values.

Followers of a party frequently retweet its tweets.

Information mainly reaches similar-minded users, limiting diversity.

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.