Japan's 2014 General Election: Political Bots, Right-Wing Internet Activism, and Prime Minister Shinzō Abe's Hidden Nationalist Agenda

Abstract In this article, we present results on the identification and behavioral analysis of social bots in a sample of 542,584 Tweets, collected before and after Japan's 2014 general election. Typical forms of bot activity include massive Retweeting and repeated posting of (nearly) the same message, sometimes used in combination. We focus on the second method and present (1) a case study on several patterns of bot activity, (2) methodological considerations on the automatic identification of such patterns and the prerequisite near-duplicate detection, and (3) we give qualitative insights into the purposes behind the usage of social/political bots. We argue that it was in the latency of the semi-public sphere of social media—and not in the visible or manifest public sphere (official campaign platform, mass media)—where Shinzō Abe's hidden nationalist agenda interlocked and overlapped with the one propagated by organizations such as Nippon Kaigi and Internet right-wingers (netto uyo) during the election campaign, the latter potentially forming an enormous online support army of Abe's agenda.

[1]  R. Koopmans,et al.  Political Claims Analysis: Integrating Protest Event and Political Discourse Approaches , 1999 .

[2]  Fabian Schäfer,et al.  Public Opinion and the Press: Transnational Contexts of Early Media and Communication Studies in Prewar Japan, 1918–1937 , 2011 .

[3]  Woody Allen,et al.  Everyone says I love you , 1996 .

[4]  Di Wang,et al.  The Rise of Twitter in the Political Campaign: Searching for Intermedia Agenda-Setting Effects in the Presidential Primary , 2015, J. Comput. Mediat. Commun..

[5]  Joshua A. Williams,et al.  Netizens Decide 2014? A Look at Party Campaigning Online , 2016 .

[6]  Rumi Sakamoto,et al.  ‘Koreans, Go Home!’ Internet Nationalism in Contemporary Japan as a Digitally Mediated Subculture , 2011 .

[7]  Jeff Kingston.  Nationalism and the 2014 Snap Election: The Abe Conundrum , 2016 .

[8]  Fabian Schäfer.  Medium als Vermittlung , 2017 .

[9]  Zizi Papacharissi.  A Networked Self , 2010 .

[10]  Tessa Morris-Suzuki.  Freedom of Hate Speech; Abe Shinzo and Japan's Public Sphere ヘイトスピーチ（憎悪発言）の自由ー安倍晋三と日本の公共空間 , 2013 .

[11]  Phil Sudo.  Freedom of hate speech , 1992 .

[12]  Stefan Stieglitz,et al.  Do Social Bots (Still) Act Different to Humans? - Comparing Metrics of Social Bots with Those of Humans , 2017, HCI.

[13]  Thomas A. Hollihan.  The dispute over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands : how media narratives shape public opinion and challenge the global order , 2014 .

[14]  Axel Bruns,et al.  Sharing the News: Dissemination of Links to Australian News Sites on Twitter , 2013 .

[15]  J. Dijck.  The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media , 2013 .

[16]  Tarleton Gillespie,et al.  The politics of ‘platforms’ , 2010, New Media Soc..

[17]  樋口 直人,et al.  Japan's ultra-right , 2016 .

[18]  Philip N. Howard,et al.  Bots, #StrongerIn, and #Brexit: Computational Propaganda during the UK-EU Referendum , 2016, ArXiv.

[19]  Bernard C. Y. Tan,et al.  Group Polarization and Computer-Mediated Communication: Effects of Communication Cues, Social Presence, and Anonymity , 2002, Inf. Syst. Res..

[20]  Justin M. Rao,et al.  Filter Bubbles, Echo Chambers, and Online News Consumption , 2016 .

[21]  B. Latour.  On actor-network theory : A few clarifications , 1996 .

[22]  Volker Gerhardt.  Öffentlichkeit : die politische Form des Bewusstseins , 2012 .

[23]  Jessica Einspänner,et al.  Politische Deliberation online – Twitter als Element des politischen Diskurses , 2012 .

[24]  Takeshi Suzuki,et al.  How the Japanese Social Media Users Discussed the Senkaku Controversy , 2014 .

[25]  T. Shibutani.  Improvised News: A Sociological Study of Rumor , 1966 .

[26]  D. Snow,et al.  Frame alignment processes, micromobilization, and movement participation. , 1986 .

[27]  Gabriele Meiselwitz,et al.  Social Computing and Social Media , 2014, Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

[28]  Taku Kudo,et al.  MeCab : Yet Another Part-of-Speech and Morphological Analyzer , 2005 .

[29]  Simon Hegelich,et al.  Are Social Bots on Twitter Political Actors? Empirical Evidence from a Ukrainian Social Botnet , 2016, ICWSM.

[30]  Fabian Schäfer,et al.  Media/Communication Studies and Cultural Studies in Japan (1920s–1990s): From ‘Public Opinion’ to the ‘Public Sphere’ , 2017 .

[31]  Anne Helmond,et al.  The Algorithmization of the Hyperlink , 2013 .

[32]  Hiroki Azuma.  General Will 2.0: Rousseau, Freud, Google , 2014 .

[33]  Brayden G. King,et al.  The Logic of Connective Action: Digital Media and the Personalization of Contentious Politics. By W. Lance Bennett and Alexandra Segerberg. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Pp. xiv+240. $29.99 (paper). , 2014 .