The Relationship Between Japanese Political Ideology and Social Networking Information Behavior
Kaho Suzuki (AY 2023)
In recent years, the phenomenon of the echo chamber has gained attention. This is a detrimental effect of the development of social networking, which has allowed people to see only what they want to see and receive only the information they want to receive. Echo chambers are now being noticed in the political arena. This is because even before the advent of social networking sites, political issues brought together people who shared the same political views. In a previous study, we focused on users of right-wing and left-wing SNS in foreign countries and examined users' responses to posts, quotes, likes, and replies on their own politically ideological SNS! and replies. However, there are many unanswered questions about Japanese users. In particular, there are few studies that reflect the unique political position of Japanese people, who are less likely to have a strong political ideology than their counterparts in other countries. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to test the hypothesis that Japanese people's unique political ideology is expressed in their information behavior on social networking sites.
The specific research strategy was to conduct an online questionnaire survey among users of X (formerly Twitter) and to examine the relationship between the survey results and users' postings on X. In the questionnaire survey, 462 people were asked to complete the questionnaire, and 16 responses were received. Based on the results, the users were grouped into four clusters by hierarchical clustering. The clusters were CO01, CO02, CO03, and CO04 in this clustering. In addition, the users followed by these 16 users were designated as followers, and the posts of the 16 users and 26 followers were analyzed.
The results showed that CO01 is a cluster with a negative stance on collective self-defense and the economy, but with disagreement on the issues of increased taxation, diplomacy with Russia, married couples, same-sex marriage, and permanent residency for foreigners; CO02 is a cluster with a positive stance on public works and reducing the consumption tax rate; CO03 is a cluster with a negative stance on the armed forces; CO04 is a cluster with negative views on social welfare and employment, and a cluster with a variety of other views. Using Python, we extracted topic models from the posts in the clusters and analyzed the topics to find a relationship between the posts and political ideology.
Among the four clusters, CO01, CO02, and CO03 showed a relationship between the response trends in the questionnaire and the content of the posts, while CO04 showed no relationship, but political opinions were frequently expressed in the posts. Thus, it was found that a tendency toward political ideology peculiar to Japanese people can be observed in their information behavior on SNS. Future research is expected to cover a wider range of users in SNS.
(Translated by DeepL)