2021.04.01

DISCUSSION PAPER_No.21(21-002)“The Agenda-Setting Function of Twitter and Its User’s Characteristics on COVID-19: An Empirical Research Using Log Data and Survey Data in Japan”

DISCUSSION PAPER No.21(21-002)

“The Agenda-Setting Function of Twitter and Its User’s Characteristics on COVID-19: An Empirical Research Using Log Data and Survey Data in Japan”

Tsukasa Tanihara(Ph.D. Student at Graduate School of Human Relations, Keio University / Research assistant at the Center for Global Communications, International University of Japan / Special Research Fellow for JSPS)

 

Abstract

This study investigates the functions of Twitter as a medium during COVID-19. Specifically, we analyze the agenda-setting function of Twitter (Study 1) and characteristics of information disseminators on Twitter (Study 2) related to the COVID-19 pandemic. In Study 1, we examined rank correlations between the media agendas on COVID-19 identified from two months of two newspapers and Twitter content data, and public agendas identified from an internet survey (n = 903). The results indicated that Twitter has a shorter-term agenda-setting function compared with the newspapers and resonates with those who have liberal tendencies. In Study 2, we used data from the internet survey to identify political attitudes of people who tweet or retweet on COVID-19. The descriptive statistics indicated that 2.1% of users generated 54.3% of COVID-19-related tweets, and 3.0% generated 62.3% of the retweets. This means that more than half of the COVID-19-related discourses on Twitter were generated by a small number of users. Results of the logit model analyses revealed that those who tweeted regarding COVID-19 tend to be liberal, and those who retweeted tend to have the “flaming orientation”. Based on these results and the nature of retweeting that is less psychologically demanding than tweeting, it is possible to see that people with liberal tendencies, motivated by their political attitude, create original tweets, and some of those tweets are then retweeted by flaming-oriented people driven by a sense of justice. This seems to be how information about COVID-19 spreads on Twitter.

Keyword

COVID-19, Twitter, Agenda-setting function, Public opinion, Analysis on Twitter users, Tweet and Retweet

April 2021

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