ArticleAuthors: Tetsuro Kobayashi; Yuki Ogawa; Takahisa Suzuki; Hitoshi Yamamoto (2019)
Although computational approaches to ideology-based audience fragmentation are promising, they are not without limitations.
First, most existing studies have focused on the US, and the cross-national validity of their results has rarely been tested. Second, previous studies that rely solely on behavioral data from social media tend to make strong analytical assumptions such as that Twitter users prefer to follow media and politicians whose ideological positions are similar to their own, and that the ideologies of political elites can be extrapolated to infer the ideologies of ordinary users. We aim to address these limitations.
First, we focus on Japan to test the generalizability o...