An Analysis Of Global Political Leaders' Social Network Influence On Twitter

In the era of new media,global political leaders actively embrace social media platforms to engage themselves in diplomacy and public diplomacy,and to compete for the influence in the same online sphere.One leader's following and interacting with another on public social media platforms denote not only their personal preferences but also the consideration of international relationship and influence.Therefore,political leaders' social network relationship and information flow can reflect their relationship structure and information flow pattern in the real world.Given the scenario,this research concentrates on the relation network and mention network of global political leaders on Twitter,and analyzes the network influence of each political leader from the perspective of nodes,structure and cliques.As shown in the results,60% of world political leaders created Twitter accounts,and formed an interconnected relation network.However,the network density and centralization index are relatively low,indicating a scattered distribution of network power.Seen from each node's betweenness centrality,authoritative centrality and total degree centrality,the French president Emmanuel Macron,the Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy,and the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi are the most influential nodes.The correlation test shows that the influence of political leaders in the network is not independent of their national power and resources.From the perspective of network structure,there forms a “core-periphery” structure,where 24 leaders locate in the core,and 91 in the peripheral zone.Among the 24 core leaders,14 are from developing countries and 10 from developed countries.Compared with the modern world systems,the power and influence of political leaders in the network present disparity: among the 19 core nations in the world systems,only 7 of them stay in the core of global political leader's social network;the once Europe-centered world system now alters to an America-centered one.From the perspective of network cliques,26 political leaders constitute 23 cliques,which can be classified into four groups by geography,respectively the European clique,the American clique,the European-American clique,and the European-Asian-American clique.Through the analysis of mention network in the cliques,information hubs were detected.They are respectively Emmanuel Macron,the French president in the European clique;Juan Santos,president of Columbia,in the European-American clique;and Donald Trump,the president of the United States in the European-Asian-American clique.The American clique is an exception among the cliques,as the power distribution is highly balanced,and there presents no leader with overwhelming power.In the four types of cliques,tweet topics with regional features were discussed,but in the cliques formed by leaders from trans-continental countries,no mutual topic was found among different continents.The research results are further discussed from five perspectives in the last.