WHAT IS A ROLE OF TWITTER IN THAI POLITICAL COMMUNICATION?

As internet and smartphones have become more accessible in Thailand, a growth of social networking service (SNS) has been continuously increased. Twitter has ranked as one of the top SNS among other services for several years. With unique feathers of Twitter, it is worthy to investigate how Twitter is used by Thai users. Since politics in Thailand has always been one of the most discussed topic due to its instability, Thai politics was focused in this study. Here, the author aimed to determine a role of Twitter in Thai political communication. Furthermore, factors that influenced the role of Twitter were listed. Four data sets of tweets were collected during the time political incidents occurred. Three analyses were conducted, i.e., format of communication, distribution of user activity and content analysis. Results from the analyses showed that Twitter acted as an information disseminating tool. Most information was informative and it was spread widely among the users. Scale of event, reoccurrence of event and censorship were found to be the factors that affected the role of Twitter. The first two factors influenced size of data set and sentiments in tweets. The last factor affected sources of information and was likely to decrease the size of data set