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The fake news that circulated on social media in 2020 and 2022 affected the voters of the South Korean general and presidential elections, respectively. The political controversy, centered on the election fraud that occurred in both the elections, received significant attention from the society. This study emphasizes the Twitter discourse and compares the formation and distribution of election fraud. We conduct semantic social network analysis and structural topic modeling (STM) to represent topics and relationships among the emerging themes using Twitter texts related to both elections. Results demonstrate that discourses on the same political issue exhibited unique contents and structures, as information is formed and distributed differently depending on the type of election in South Korea. Furthermore, this study illustrates the process and analysis of large-scale text data collected from Twitter. It also includes new methods, such as political ideology, for considering an analytical dimension.
KeyWords: Election Fraud, General Election, Presidential Election, Structural Topic Modeling, Semantic Network Analysis
L Introduction
During elections, several issues emerge and become critical topics, particularly sociocultural and political issues, including those related to the election. The election fraud issue commonly appeared during the two major elections in South Korea previously. Thus, it became a popular theme in the 21st National Assembly and 20th presidential election in 2020 and 2022, respectively, in conjunction with the COVID-19 pandemic, fueling the social and political confusion. Election fraud, which was raised in earnest during the parliamentary election, mainly comprised allegations of manipulation in statistics and counting. The major claims are similarity in the proportion of votes between regions at the statistical level and the relatively high proportion of prevoting. Operational problems were also identified, including poor voting management due to positive cases of COVID-19 during the presidential election. Particularly, the election fraud during the 2020 general election was repeatedly raised on social media platforms and political sites by the same party and the same politician in the 2022 presidential election, serving as a valid political discourse for sure voters.
The controversy surrounding these elections quickly spread through online communities, media channels, and social media networks like YouTube. Allegations related to specific political issues simultaneously emerged, such as similar differences in voting results and the poor administration of the voting process during COVID-19. These...