Paper Title
A Study of The Impacts of Facebook Fan Page use About Beipiao Incident on Candidate’s Preference in 2018 Kaohsiung Mayoral Election

Abstract
Beipiao, or “northern drifter,” has become a popular catchphrase in Taiwan’s 2018 local election since Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) Kaohsiung mayoral candidate Han Kuo-yu claimed that nearly 410,000 Kaohsiung natives had moved to Taipei in search of better jobs, blaming 20 years of Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) governance of Kaohsiung for making the city “old and poor,” and the lack of employment opportunities has forced the youth to migrate to Taipei by which the term Beipiao was adopted. Han has pledged that, if he is elected mayor, he would double the city’s population by shoring up investments to boost abundant job growth. In the beginning of the campaign period, Han was not expected to win the election. But the Beipiao issue has made Han’s visibility unexpectedly higher. Being an untraditional politician who spoke frankly, Han had become very popular among the youth on social media. Media started to put a spotlight on him, a lot of media fan pages covered his news, and a lot of posts about him were shown on personal fan pages, Han seemed to win the internet air combat. The so-called “Han Kuo-yu phenomenon” coined by the media had taken place in a short period of time. Can the positive and negative mentions on social media really influence voters’ attitude toward a candidate? Oates and Moe (2016) pointed out that the data collected through the social media monitoring platform is superficial and may contain biases. So focusing only on the amount of sentiment of posts or messages on social media is likely to provide a false signal. Thus, this study not only tried to use the big data software to collect all the positive and negative mentions of Han on Facebook about Beipiao issue , but also tried to further figure out if being exposed to Facebook fan page posts is able to lead to people’s positive attitude or negative attitude toward Han. According to past literature, the use of social media can enhance voters' preference for a candidate (Houston, McKinney, Hawthorne, Grenenwood & Spialek, 2013), this study will further test the assumptions that if the posts of fan pages being received are positive or negative toward Han, will they also influence people’s attitude toward the candidate? The results of big data analysis showed that the number of the posts concerning Beipiao and Han is 3,174. The number of Like is 2,112,479. It is obvious that Beipiao issue really caught Internet users’ attention. In addition, via online survey, we found that after controlling the possible impacts of demographic variables, party id, interpersonal communication, traditional media use, and the other social media use (include Line, Instagram and Twitter), Facebook fan page use can significantly predict the candidate’s preference. The more positive posts of fan pages are being reached, the more the voters will like Han, and the more negative posts of fan pages are being reached, the less the voters will like Han.