Seeking Opinion Leaders on Twitter: the #Delete Facebook Campaign
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International Journal of Management and Applied Science, ISSN: 2394-7926 Volume-4, Issue-9, Sep.-2018 http://iraj.in SEEKING OPINION LEADERS ON TWITTER: THE #DELETE FACEBOOK CAMPAIGN 1YOUNG JOON LIM, 2JENNIFER LEMANSKI The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley E-mail: [email protected], [email protected] Abstract - In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, some opinion leaders show their public and personal motive to call for action against Facebook on the Twitter network. This study analyzes the #deletefacebook campaign, seeking opinion leaders who initiate and popularize it on Twitter. By using NodeXL, this study visualizes and identifies the procedures of how a Twitter campaign goes viral by influential people on Twitter. Index Terms - Cambridge Analytica, #deletefacebook, Opinion Leaders, Twitter I. INTRODUCTION II. LITERATURE REVIEW Since its launch of 2006, Twitter has gone through A. Cambridge Analytica some tough times against emerging new social media U.K.-based Strategic Communication Laboratories sites such as Snapchat and Instagram, while Facebook Group (SCL) founded Cambridge Analytica as its U.S. has gained steady and strong momentum to become arm for political and public relations operations. the top social media site. Twitter’s user base in the Former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon United States declined to 68 million from 70 million and conservative mega-donors Rebekah and Robert in 2016, due to Facebook’s strategic decision and Mercer were founding members of Cambridge operation to strengthen the news feed (Fiegerman, Analytica (Chang, 2018). Cambridge Analytica was 2017). However, Twitter showed strong performance hired by Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, and as an online forum for news and political activity in employees at the firm ran the gamut of campaign the United States in 2017. work, including “managing media relations as well as fundraising, planning events, and providing President Donald Trump centered on the rejuvenation communications strategy and talking points, speeches, of the social network with his controversial tweet debate prep” (Timberg & Hamburger, 2018, para. 7). storms. Facebook was dragged into a political storm The campaign was named as Project Ripon, in which since President Trump took office because of the “Cambridge Analytica would advise American evidence of ad spending related to fake Russian campaigns on how to use data to find ‘hidden Facebook accounts that could have interfered the Republicans’” (para. 20). One alleged unethical issue electoral process of U.S. presidential election of 2016 of using the Facebook data for the campaign was that (Heath, 2017). The debate to hold Facebook Facebook, with 68 percent of American adults using it, responsible for mishandling of information and was used as a social media platform by the foreign accounts spread through Twitter, but no actual action company to spread political propaganda as a weapon was taken despite the fact that the pressure on of psychological warfare (Vaidhyanathan, 2018). Facebook for securing private user information has built for years. B. Social Network Analysis (SNA) and Twitter opinion leaders The scandal was exposed by a whistleblower who used The term social network is defined as “the articulation to work for a company named Cambridge Analytica, of a social relationship, ascribed or achieved, among which collected data over 50 million Facebook users individuals, families, households, villages, and used the data to target messages to voters. The communities, regions, and so on” (Bandyopadhyay, scandal led to a Twitter trending of #DeleteFacebook Rao, & Sinha, 2011, p.1). In order for researchers to in March 2018. In the wake of the scandal, this study analyze social network, conceptual and practical outlines who sparks the trending and what makes elements of social network were introduced such as online advocates and advocacy groups through digraph diagrams (graphs if the relationship has no Twitter advance ideas that lead to a social campaign. direction), a vertex or node (a unit for a digraph), arc From a public relations perspective, this study (a tie with a direction), and edge (a tie without searches for explanations of the effects of a Twitter direction). Using such elements of social network, campaign in relation to online opinion leaders who act researchers have developed “various characteristics of as advocates. the pattern of distribution of relational ties” and drawn Seeking Opinion Leaders on Twitter: The #Delete Facebook Campaign 85 International Journal of Management and Applied Science, ISSN: 2394-7926 Volume-4, Issue-9, Sep.-2018 http://iraj.in “inferences about the network as a whole or about opinion leaders, Stamatiou et al. (2008) pointed out those belonging to it considered individually or in that opinion leaders on Twitter may well be based on groups” (p. 3-4). Based on the development, Horng, existing offline status, such as reputation and Liao, and Wang (2017) conceptualized social network established networks. analysis (SNA) as the process of investigating social structures through the use of networks and graphs. C. #DeleteFacebook movement and theoretical SNA has been widely utilized in various fields, framework for information flow including sociology, anthropology and political When the Cambridge Analytica scandal was first science to address different issues under a specific exposed by the New York Times on March 17, 2018, network circumstance (Zheng et al, 2016). Federal regulators and state prosecutors were opening investigations into Facebook. The main issue of the Previous studies from the social science perspective investigation was about the breach that allowed utilized SNA to investigate the informal relational Cambridge Analytica to exploit the private social links of social group identify of individuals in terms of media activity of a huge swath of the American group membership and social interactions (Yun, et al., electorate for Trump’s campaign in 2016 (Rosenberg, 2015; Jones, 2015; Choi, Sang, & Park, 2014). More Confessore, & Cadwalladr, 2018). As a result, recently, researchers began to apply SNA to study investors asking whether Facebook had mishandled patterns between relations of a variety of social users’ data had cut the value of the social networking structures, mainly including the data gathered from giant by about $50 billion in the past two days of the social media. For example, Kim and Hastak (2018) launch of the investigation. The lucrative business used SNA for Twitter and Facebook to explore a model for Facebook to make profits is to sell critical role in disaster management of propagating advertisements based on its users’ ages, interests and emergency information to a disaster-affected other details. Amid the scandal, the debate for community, and argued that social networks consisted regulating social media companies to protect their of the entities of individuals and organizations in the users’ personal information has gained public social media community. Twitter can be a useful momentum at the time of this writing. In a similar barometer of the reach of an ongoing event or vein, the hashtag #DeleteFacebook was trending on real-time issue, and it could be “the foremost social Twitter on March 21 (Gilbert, 2018). Although a network for real-time reaching and for the monitoring popular method on Twitter for drawing public and other’s reactions” (Miller & Behm- Morawitz, 2017, media attention is the use of hashtags – keywords p. 142). In other words, Twitter is commonly known accompanied by the symbol of # (Thorson et al., 2016), by experts as the leader in creating and spreading most hashtags failed to get into a public sphere of public opinions in the digital world. popularity as very few were able to muster substantial public attention to their causes on Twitter. An opinion leader refers to a person whose opinions about a product or an issue have a big influence on the The process of Twitter opinion leaders’ involvement opinions of others (Cambridge Dictionary). He or she in a campaign can be explained by the theory of tends to possess particular characteristics, “such as two-step flow (Katz & Lazarsfeld, 1955). This theory high social status, wide social networks, and they are posits that information from the mass media moves in highly engaged in civic affairs” (Park & Kaye, 2106, two distinct stages: First, opinion leaders pay close p. 174). As Twitter is a convenient and strategic tool attention to social issues and national affairs which are for opinion leaders to spread their short messages with reported by the mass media; and second, they pass their own commentary posts in brevity, Twitter posts their own interpretations of such issues and affairs to are publicly viewed and responded, providing a the public, in addition to the actual media content. The vibrant forum for public opinions. The concept of theory explains the process of how opinion leaders opinion leader in the Twitter or even social media become influencers on particular issues, in which the community is still being developed and widely mass media reported to the public. The theory also under-researched. Park and Kaye (2016) argued that it refines the ability to predict the influence of opinion was not certain whether the original concept of leaders’ messages on the behavior of message opinion leaders would hold true in the Twitter receivers, and it clarifies why certain campaigns may community.