Recent Fragmentation of Japanese Political Discourse on Twitter

Abstract

As the use of social media has rapidly grown, more and more people are relying on social media even for political decision-making. It is widely known that the echo chamber effect, the phenomenon that people with similar opinions tend to connect more deeply, appears in social media, as prior research showed that two political clusters, regarded as left and right, were formed on Twitter. In this study, we illustrate that current political discourse on Twitter has become more fragmented than before, same as the real political situation in Japan. We also show when and how such new clusters were formed by creating temporal networks and tracking affiliation in the political echo chambers, suggesting that the political discourse on Twitter closely reflects the real political situation.