The influence of anti-Korean sentiment on communications with political parties

Abstract

Focusing on users who express anti-Korean sentiment, this chapter analyzed the social graphs and retweeters of tweets from political parties during the 48th general election for Japan's Lower House in 2017. This study was intended to elucidate the political parties' power to disseminate their messages on Twitter, with a specific focus on the roles played by anti-Korean users during the propagation process. The results indicate that anti-Korean users had stronger political interest than other users, and they tended to retweet conservative parties' tweets. The ratio of anti-Korean users to party retweeters was highest for the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan (LDP), which is the conservative party. We also found that followers of the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan (CDP), the liberal party, frequently retweeted CDP tweets. However, because the redundancy of CDP followers is high, the CDP was unable to reach any more users than the LDP despite having more followers and retweeters. The most important finding from this study is that a small number of anti-Korean users play a crucial role in spreading conservative parties' messages, particularly those from the LDP.