Exploring political discussions by Korean twitter users

Abstract

Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to provide a network analysis of Twitter discussions about Myung-Bak Lee, a former president of South Korea, to gain a better understanding of the dynamics of the public opinion exchange on Twitter. Design/methodology/approach -Opinion leaders in the discussion network were identified by considering the longitudinal distribution of tweets containing the former president's name, and three types of messages ("followings," "mentions," and "retweets") were analyzed using data collected from November 1, 2011, to April 20, 2012. The sample included 26,150 Twitter users and 892,034 relationships reflecting three types of messages. Findings -The results indicate that the discussion about President Myung-Bak Lee was dominated by liberal Twitter users who already had considerable influence both online and offline. In addition, Twitter users were unlikely to interact with other users with opposing political views. Research limitations/implications -Almost all of the opinion leaders identified in the study held liberal political views, and liberal Twitter users dominated the discussion network. In addition, the Korean Twitter network showed the presence of the homophily phenomenon, implying that opinion leaders' influence within the Twitter network was limited to other users sharing the same political views. Further, political views of opinion leaders were skewed toward a particular political stance without necessarily representing the opinion of the general public, possibly hindering the democratic process. Originality/value -This study tests the homophily thesis in the context of Twitter users in Korea and contributes to the literature on Twitter-based political discourse by identifying opinion leaders in Korean Twitter networks and examining the phenomenon of homophily within those networks.

Twitter and Political Campaigning

“…Katz and Lazarsfeld ) within these networks has gained renewed interest in the social media era. Using Twitter data Myunggoon, Choi et al () identify the opinion leaders for South Korea regarding online talk about President Myung‐Bak Lee. Interestingly, the opinion leaders found in the Twitter network were also influential in the offline world, suggesting that the online and offline realms are intertwined.…”

How leaders tweet: An exploratory analysis of entrepreneurial leader tweets.

“…This may be a missed opportunity for many leaders to engage their employees and deliver a powerful message. Political leaders have already shown that they can engage their followers through Twitter (Choi et al, 2014; Park, 2013; Starke et al, 2020), yet corporate leaders do not seem to view the platform in this way. Leaders in other contexts such as religion (Narbona, 2016) and public relations (Sweetser & Kelleher, 2011) have utilized the platform effectively in this manner.…”

Las asociaciones de enfermedades raras: Estructura de sus redes e identificación de los líderes de opinión mediante la técnica del análisis de redes sociales

“…Para capturar la red de conexiones de las cuentas @FEDER_ONG, @eurordis y @RareDiseases y visibilizar sus patrones de interacción y/o difusión se empleó el programa NodeXL, "uno de los principales software de análisis de código abierto para análisis y visualización de redes" (Lieberman, 2014: 3), diseñado por el sociólogo Marc Smith para facilitar el aprendizaje de los conceptos y métodos de análisis de redes sociales con la visualización como un componente clave (Hansen et al, 2010: 54;Smith, 2014Smith, : 1153) y que ha sido utilizado con éxito en diferentes investigaciones como las de Lichoti et al (2010) -que proporcionó información sobre la epidemiología de la peste porcina africana-, Verweij (2012) -que examinó las conexiones entre políticos y periodistas-, Choi et al (2014) -que analizó las discusiones políticas de los usuarios de Twitter de Corea-, Dossis et al (2015) -que estudió la difusión de varios hashtag durante la reciente crisis griega-, Perez, Meso y Mendiguren (2018) -que investigaron de qué hablan los líderes políticos españoles con los medios de comunicación y periodistas-o Ahmed y Lugovic, ( 2019) -que estudiaron la difusión de noticias-.…”