Identity Use and Misuse of Public Persona on Twitter

Abstract

Social media sites have appeared during the last 10 years and their use has exploded all over the world. Twitter is a microblogging service that has currently 320 million user profiles and over 100 million daily active users. Many celebrities and leading politicians have a verified profile on Twitter, including Justin Bieber, president Obama, and the Pope. In this paper we investigate the '‘hundreds of Putins and Obamas phenomenon’ on Twitter. We collected two data sets in 2015 containing 582 and 6477 profiles that are related to the G20 leaders’ profiles on Twitter. The number of namesakes varied from 5 to 1000 per leader. We analysed in detail various aspects of the Putin and Erdogan related profiles. For the first ones we looked into the language of the profiles, their follower sets, the address in the profile and where the tweets were really sent from. For both profile sets we investigated why the accounts were created. For this, we deduced 12 categories based on the information in the profile and the contents of the sent tweets. The research is exploratory in nature, but we tentatively looked into online identity, communication and political theories that might explain emergence of these kinds of Twitter profiles.