TABLE 3.
Peaka | Date | Influential eventsb | No. of all tweets | No. of original and reply | No. of retweets | Prominencec |
(a) | 6/21 | A subcommittee meeting of the Cabinet Office’s Consumer Committee stated that it is difficult to make the labeling of genome-edited foods mandatory on June 20. | 535 | 54 | 481 | 436 |
(b) | 6/30 | The Ministry of Health and Welfare (MHLW) began to collect public comments on genome-edited foods from June 27. | 569 | 13 | 556 | 566 |
(c) | 8/13 | An opposition politician posted a tweet on August 13 insisting mandatory labeling of genome-edited foods. | 802 | 13 | 789 | 799 |
(d) | 9/20 | The MHLW and the Consumer Affairs Agency announced their policies for handling and labeling genome-edited foods on September 19. | 2,569 | 275 | 2,294 | 2,239 |
(e) | 9/25 | Many news introducing the basis of genome editing technology and reviewing government’s policies were widely publicized in TV programs, newspapers, and so on. | 3,426 | 142 | 3,284 | 3,387 |
(f) | 10/7 | There seemed to be no major events, but there were various kinds of tweets on news, signature activities, and so on. | 1,397 | 129 | 1,268 | 1,297 |
aThe first column represents the peaks in Figure 1. bInfluential events include government announcements, mass media, and tweets by influential public figures. cThe prominence of each peak is calculated using SciPy 1.4.1, which is module of Python.