Analysis of tweets from Japanese and American politicians

1. How Do Japanese Politicians and American
Politicians use Twitter?
Adam Acar

2. In our social media seminar, each student is
assigned a research project. Yumeno, a senior
international relations major, compared how
Japanese and American politicians use Twitter. She
collected the last 10 posts of the 10
most popular politicians in the
US and Japan in January, 2013.
HOW?

3. Twitter accounts
the U.S. Japan
1 Barack Obama (@BarackObama) 橋下 徹 (@t_ishin)
2 Al Gore (@algore) 鳩山 由紀夫 (@hatoyamayukio)
3 John McCain (@SenJohnMcCain) 東国原 英夫 (@higashi_giin)
4 Mitt Romney (@MittRomney) 蓮舫 (@renho_sha)
5 Sarah Palin (@SarahPalinUSA) 猪瀬 直樹 (@inosenaoki)
6
Speaker John Boehner
(@SpeakerBoehner)
原口 一博 (@kharaguchi)
7 Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) 河野 太郎 (@konotarogomame)
8 Paul Ryan (@RepPaulRyan) 谷垣 禎一 (@Tanigaki_S)
9 Nancy Pelosi (@NancyPelosi) 小池 百合子 (@ecoyuri)
10 Ron Paul (@RepRonPaul) 舛添 要一 (@MasuzoeYoichi)

4. Comparisons
Categories The U.S. Japan
Status update 1% 8%
Criticizing someone or some idea 3% 13%
State own opinion 13% 26%
Self-Promotion 15% 3%
Mention stats, research finding 1% 1%
Updates about articles, pictures 4% 4%
Quotes from speech 5% 0%
Promoting another website 34% 13%
Promote another group or person
who 4% 0%
Action 6% 16%
Greetings to other politicians 3% 1%
Greetings to the supporters and
citizen 5% 7%
Daily life 0% 6%
Quotations 1% 1%
Related to interests 3% 1%
Quotes others person’s comments
or idea 1% 0%
Sample: The last 10 tweets of the 10 most popular American
Politicians vs. the last 10 tweets of the 10 most popular Japanese
politicians.

5. Conclusion
• Japanese values are not necessarily reflected on Japanese
politicians’ tweets. (Or ) Japanese politicians who actively use
Twitter may not be mainstream politicians.
• Although Japanese people tend to criticize others less and state
their own opinion less (Gudykunts & Nishida, 1994) compared to
Americans, our results indicate that on Twitter Japanese
politicians are more outspoken than their American counterparts.
• Self-promotion and promotion of another person or group
because of doing a good job was way more common in the US as
this may be related with the group oriented nature of Asian
societies where groups but not individuals are the main focus.

6. Contact me to get the dataset
acarteaching –at – gmail.com