The Interaction Between Politician and Netizens in Facebook: A Big Data Approach

• In Event: Social Media, Big Data Analysis, and Electoral Politics in Taiwan

Abstract

This study employs the method of text mining to explore the campaign strategies of national identity appealing adopted by Taiwan’s 2016 presidential election winner, Tsai, Ing-wen and netizens’ reactions in Facebook. It is a new pattern between populism and privilege’s communication in the campaign. As many have known, as a DPP’s candidate running for the presidency of Taiwan in 2016, Tsai strongly emphasizes her and the party’s national identity stance, that is, the Taiwan identity, which is different from her KMT competitor’s dual identity as “I am both a Taiwanese and a Chinese.”
Recently, a number of studies focused on exploring the way in which identity was strengthened by social mobilization, as well as the connection between citizens’ political identities and political elites’ issue framings. (Bennett, 012; Giddens, 1991; Putnam, 2000). Previous studies also found that politicians used new communication technology to construct or strengthen people’s identities with some kinds of ideologies to empower and to mobilize citizens’ political participations or even to change some people’s social statuses (Castells, 1996). Some scholars believed that this kind of identity construction and strengthening through new media might result in populism  ( Kushin & Yamamoto, 2010; King, Orlando & Sparks, 2015; Groshek & Koc-Michalska, 2017; Emily & Albert, 2009; Charlisle & Patton, 2013; Tufekci, 2014).
Based on some of the previous studies on Internet and political campaign communication, the research questions of this study are: (1) What are the frequent words of identity used by fans in Tsai’s official Facebook? (2) What are the frequent words of identity used by Tsai’s campaign team in Tsai’s official Facebook? And then, this study compares netizens’ and candidate’s opinion climate of identity issue.
Regarding research method, this study analyzes Tsai, Ing-wen’s Facebook fan-page text and netizens’ relevant responses between April 15, 2015 and January 16, 2016. Netvizz and R language are utilized for information crawling and text mining of relevant Facebook information. Finally, the results of text mining are presented as word cloud diagrams.
The results of text mining indicate that in Tsai’s Facebook fan-page, the most frequently appeared keywords are: “we” (41498.1) and “Taiwan” (30686.3), followed by “one” (10811.8), “country” (9074.4), “future” (8053.09), and “Democratic Progressive Party” (7841.49). As for the netizens’ responses in Tsai’s fan-page, the frequently appeared words are “President”, “Taiwan”, “we”, “Democratic Progressive Party”, “country”, “one”, “people”, and “China”.
 The text mining results of this study indicate that rather than using complicated arguments or narratives to persuade voters to accept a specific kind of national identity, a candidate might successfully call for netizens’ identities with her (his) ideology simply by repeatedly using some daily words and phrases related to the ideology, such as “We are in the same country, her name is Taiwan.” , or “we only have one national identity, that is Taiwan identity.” as many as several thousand times in her (his) Facebook fan-page.

Authors

• Yu-Wei Hu, Chinese Culture University

• Jung Chun Chang, SOAS, University of London