AUTHOR=Yi Hongfa , Wang Yike 

TITLE=Who Is Affecting Who: The New Changes of Personal Influence in the Social Media Era

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology

VOLUME=Volume 13 - 2022

YEAR=2022

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.899778

DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2022.899778

ISSN=1664-1078

ABSTRACT=With the development of social media, some individuals who have great influence on the Internet have become opinion leaders, which means that traditional agenda setting theory can not explain the mechanism of social consensus generation in the social media era. Therefore, the individual agenda is a new perspective to study social consensus and personal influence on social media. This study defined the concept of "individual agenda", and conducted an empirical study on the relationship between media agenda, opinion leaders agenda and individual agenda, based on 71.77 million tweets sampled from the Twitter platform in 2015 with the approach of topic modeling. This study found that: (1) Most individual agendas are not consistent with the traditional public agenda , and the intrapersonal issue salience is highly related to the interpersonal issue salience , therefore, the concept of "individual agenda" has been validated empirically; (2) The media agenda has a significant positive correlation with 30.3% of individual agendas, which means professional media influences only a small number of individuals; (3) Opinion leaders agenda has no significant correlation with media agenda, while has a significant positive correlation with 31.1% of individual agendas, which means that opinion leaders have become strong competitors of traditional professional media in agenda setting. This study also discussed the relationship between individual agenda setting and public agenda setting, and the potential research directions in future.