An exploration of social media in public opinion convergence: Elaboration likelihood and semantic networks on political events

Abstract

This study investigated use of social media to enable public opinion convergence in activities with wide-scale interaction, such as in political events. Using theoretical foundations in elaboration likelihood, we explored the process of opinion convergence by analyzing Twitter data of Singapore General Election 2011. Our quantitative analyses showed that informative tweets were more effective than affective tweets in opinion convergence, and their interactive effect on social impact was significant. In addition, qualitative analyses using semantic network maps enabled us to distinguish the central and peripheral routes of influence. We discussed both theoretical and practical implications of our findings with respect to social impact and new media. © 2011 IEEE.