Echo Chambers and American and Chinese Public Diplomacy during the COVID-19 Era

• In Event: Possibilities and Limitations of Public and Face-to-Face Diplomacy

Abstract

We analyze the public diplomacy efforts made by China and the United States on Twitter under the COVID-19 pandemic. Using the data set that contains *all* the 401,354 tweets made on 431 official accounts maintained by the embassies and consulates of the two governments around the globe for the period of Feb 1-Sep 27, 2020, we construct a network data, where the nodes consist of the embassy/consulate accounts as well as other 1.9 million accounts that have responded to the embassy/consulates tweets at least once and the edges consist of the number of the times each account retweeted the Ambassadorial tweets. Analyzing the patterns and structure of the retweeting/following decisions (i.e., the total of roughly 10 million tweets) using the method in Barberá et al (2015, Pscyhological Science), we estimate other accounts’ ideological position (i.e., pro-US and pro-China). We first explore if American and Chinese public diplomacy via Twitter exhibits an echo chamber effect (i.e., the clusters of the retweeting/following accounts are decoupled between the two camps). We then aggregate the estimated ideological positions of the Twitter accounts up at the national level and test if the country-level aggregated ideological positions and its distribution correlates with survey-based indicators of pro-American and pro-Chinese sentiments, the volume of bilateral trade, the amount of foreign aid by those two governments among others.

Authors

• Shuhei Kurizaki, Waseda University

• Shohei Doi, Hokkaido University

• Takayuki Mizuno, National Institute of Informatics