HOW DO JAPANESE PEOPLE TALK ABOUT POLITICS ON TWITTER? ANALYSIS OF EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIONS IN POLITICAL TOPICS ON JAPANESE TWITTER

Abstract

This study investigated the characteristics of people who promoted political conversations on Japanese Twitter, and found that the way they mentioned political topics seemed to reflect their distrust of the current politics in Japan. Tweets from public accounts that promoted political conversations on the Lower House election day in 2017 were collected, and the nouns in these tweets were extracted. The tweets were then classified into ‘political related tweets’ and the others, based on the topics of the extracted nouns. The statistical analysis of the tweets and their metadata revealed that Twitter users who seem to be influential on political conversations tend to mention political topics with emotional expressions of anger rather than anxiety or positive emotional expressions, while other users tend to mention those topics with anxiety. These patterns seem to reflect the distrust of politics in the public opinion in Japan.