An Acceptance Analysis of Firms’ Posts on Sina Weibo to Build Credibility

BackgroundThe COVID-19 pandemic has created a global health crisis that is affecting economies and societies worldwide. During times of uncertainty and unexpected change, people have turned to social media platforms as communication tools and primary information sources. Platforms such as Twitter and Sina Weibo have allowed communities to share discussion and emotional support; they also play important roles for individuals, governments, and organizations in exchanging information and expressing opinions. However, research that studies the main concerns expressed by social media users during the pandemic is limited.ObjectiveThe aim of this study was to examine the main concerns raised and discussed by citizens on Sina Weibo, the largest social media platform in China, during the COVID-19 pandemic.MethodsWe used a web crawler tool and a set of predefined search terms (New Coronavirus Pneumonia, New Coronavirus, and COVID-19) to investigate concerns raised by Sina Weibo users. Textual information and metadata (number of likes, comments, retweets, publishing time, and publishing location) of microblog posts published between December 1, 2019, and July 32, 2020, were collected. After segmenting the words of the collected text, we used a topic modeling technique, latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), to identify the most common topics posted by users. We analyzed the emotional tendencies of the topics, calculated the proportional distribution of the topics, performed user behavior analysis on the topics using data collected from the number of likes, comments, and retweets, and studied the changes in user concerns and differences in participation between citizens living in different regions of mainland China.ResultsBased on the 203,191 eligible microblog posts collected, we identified 17 topics and grouped them into 8 themes. These topics were pandemic statistics, domestic epidemic, epidemics in other countries worldwide, COVID-19 treatments, medical resources, economic shock, quarantine and investigation, patients’ outcry for help, work and production resumption, psychological influence, joint prevention and control, material donation, epidemics in neighboring countries, vaccine development, fueling and saluting antiepidemic action, detection, and study resumption. The mean sentiment was positive for 11 topics and negative for 6 topics. The topic with the highest mean of retweets was domestic epidemic, while the topic with the highest mean of likes was quarantine and investigation.ConclusionsConcerns expressed by social media users are highly correlated with the evolution of the global pandemic. During the COVID-19 pandemic, social media has provided a platform for Chinese government departments and organizations to better understand public concerns and demands. Similarly, social media has provided channels to disseminate information about epidemic prevention and has influenced public attitudes and behaviors. Government departments, especially those related to health, can create appropriate policies in a timely manner through monitoring social media platforms to guide public opinion and behavior during epidemics.

Rather than receive the effective 2vHPV vaccines that are readily available in China, Chinese women usually wait to receive 4v and 9vHPV vaccines, which are difficult to acquire. This means that Chinese women miss the opportunity for optimal protection from cervical cancer. As social media platforms are the main channel by which Chinese women learn about HPV vaccines, this study aimed to explore how HPV vaccines are described on social media, and in particular how they discuss or distinguish 2 v, 4 v and 9vHPV vaccines. The Octopus Web crawler tool was used to capture hot Weibo posts from 2013–2021, and 1,164 valid data were obtained. Results suggested that there are very few posts with great influence on Weibo about HPV vaccines among 9 years and much of them are created by “lay people.” HPV-related topics lacked persistent popularity, comprised highly repetitive content and the spread of information was geographically diverse. There were significant differences in the media descriptions of different kinds of HPV vaccines. Price was mentioned more often in the descriptions of 2vHPV vaccines, whereas appointments were referred to most often in the descriptions of 9vHPV vaccines. There was little media attention paid to the safety and effectiveness of HPV vaccines. Chinese media should develop better collaborations with public health professionals, pay more attention to the originality of their news coverage of HPV vaccines and strive to promote HPV vaccination. Such collaboration will help news media to better understand the key points of HPV information that need to be disseminated.

In recent years, a number of social events have attracted widespread attention on various different social media platforms. Among them, the public perceptions of the same event are different on different media platforms. Because of the different privacy of different social media platforms, they have different degrees of influence on the self-construction of users, the composition of interpersonal relationships on social media platforms, and the tendency of public opinion on social media platforms. This paper focuses on two different social media, WeChat and Weibo, and examines the reasons for the phenomenon of "WeChat being silent and Weibo being active" from the perspective of their functions and characteristics and investigates the impact of this phenomenon on public opinion tendencies. This paper concludes that people are more neutral and conservative in commenting on socially focused events on social media platforms where privacy is disclosed to easy acquaintances because of the psychology of building a positive self-image, but on social media platforms with fewer acquaintances, people do not need to be responsible for their own statements, so they are less burdened when speaking, and therefore their statements have more obvious tendencies. Under the influence of this tendency, social media platforms with more privacy will have a more conservative opinion tendency and vice versa, a more aggressive opinion tendency.

Purpose Entrepreneurs seek to increase their influence and foster consumer engagement by generating content on social media platforms that expresses certainty. However, the impact of the expressive certainty of entrepreneur-generated content (EGC) on consumer engagement is unclear. Through a field study and controlled experiment, this study aims to reveal how the expressive certainty of EGC affects consumer engagement. Design/methodology/approach The proposed research model was empirically tested by analysing the content generated by 220 entrepreneurs on Sina Weibo over the past four years and conducting a randomised controlled experiment in the laboratory. Negative binomial regression and an analysis of variance were used to examine the proposed research model. Findings The results show that the expressive certainty of EGC increases consumer engagement by influencing consumers’ perceptions of leadership. Specifically, EGC with a higher level of expressive certainty makes entrepreneurs appear more confident and powerful and leads consumers to perceive them as stronger leaders, thereby positively influencing consumer engagement. In addition, EGC with a higher level of certainty stimulates more positive consumer engagement when generated via mobile devices than when generated via non-mobile devices. The authors also found that the positive effect of perceived leadership on consumer engagement is moderated by power distance. Among consumers with high power-distance, the indirect effect of expressive certainty on consumer engagement is stronger. Research limitations/implications This study is subject to several constraints that could be solved through future research. Firstly, the field study only focuses on Sina Weibo, a well-known Chinese social media platform and the experimental study focuses only on Twitter, which may limit the generalisation of this research’s results to other social media platforms. Secondly, a more sophisticated approach to data analysis could be considered for future research to ascertain some of the most effective certainty words in EGC, such as text mining and machine learning. Finally, future research could examine the impact of EGC’s expressive certainty on other significant marketing effectiveness variables, such as consumer attitudes and brand loyalty. Practical implications The results suggest that using certainty in content is a way to help entrepreneurs project a high leadership profile. The positive impact of expressive certainty on perceived leadership suggests that entrepreneurs should use more certainty expressions on social media and other communication channels (e.g. brand launches) to make themselves appear more confident and influential, which is beneficial to stimulate consumer engagement with EGC. Specifically, entrepreneurs should generate more EGC with a higher level of certainty via mobile devices, as doing so will increase consumers’ perceptions of authenticity and trust in certainty information, increasing their engagement. Originality/value This study provides a valuable complement to previous research on information dissemination and consumer engagement on social media by exploring the mechanisms by which the expressive certainty of EGC and generating devices affects consumer engagement from the perspective of perceived leadership and indicates practical guidelines for developing EGC on social media.

The emerging digital genres distributed via social media platforms have been increasingly prominent in disseminating scientific knowledge to the public audience. During COVID-19, Sina Weibo, the biggest Chinese microblogging website, has become the primary media where epidemiologists communicate knowledge of public health to the generalist audiences. Through the lens of genre theory, this exploratory qualitative study examines a corpus of 72 Weibo posts in Chinese language written by three reputable medical scholars. Six major moves with multiple steps were identified. Moreover, we found that both multimodal resources and rhetorical strategies have been employed to realize the identified moves for various functions. This study represents one of the first attempts to investigate emerging digital genres for public scientific knowledge dissemination in a non-English language. It also seeks to establish the interrelations between the identified moves and the multimodal resources along with rhetorical strategies used by bloggers. As such, it contributes to our understanding of evolving genred activities in the increasingly multilingual and multimodal ecology of public genres for scientific knowledge dissemination. Keywords: digital genres, public science, genre analysis, Chinese social media, COVID-19

While initial research on climate change communication focused on traditional media, such as news coverage of climate change and pro-environmental campaigns, scholars are increasingly focusing on the role of social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Sina Weibo. Social media platforms provide a space for three important domains of climate change communication: information, discussion, and mobilization. First, social media platforms have been used by scientists, activists, journalists, and ordinary people to share and receive reports about climate change. Policymakers and academics also use social media for climate change research. Second, social media platforms provide users with a space to discuss climate change issues. Scientists and journalists use social media to interact with the public, who also use social media to criticize policies, as well as media coverage. Finally, social media platforms have been used to coordinate rescue and relief operations in the aftermath of climate change–related disasters, as well as to organize movements and campaigns about climate change. However, most research about climate change communication in social media spaces are based on quantitative analysis of tweets from Western countries. While this body of work has been illuminating, our understanding of social media’s increasingly important role in climate change communication will benefit from a more holistic research approach that explores social media use in climate change communication across a variety of platforms, cultures, and media systems.

BackgroundA hot topic on the relationship between a popular avian-origin food and avian influenza occurred on social media during the outbreak of the emerging avian influenza A (H7N9). The misinformation generated from this topic had caused great confusion and public concern.ObjectiveOur goals were to analyze the trend and contents of the relevant posts during the outbreak. We also aimed to understand the characteristics of the misinformation and to provide suggestions to reduce public misconception on social media during the emerging disease outbreak.MethodsThe original microblog posts were collected from China’s Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo using a combination of keywords between April 1, 2013 and June 2, 2013. We analyzed the weekly and daily trend of the relevant posts. Content analyses were applied to categorize the posts into 4 types with unified sorting criteria. The posts’ characteristics and geographic locations were also analyzed in each category. We conducted further analysis on the top 5 most popular misleading posts.ResultsA total of 1680 original microblog posts on the topic were retrieved and 341 (20.30%) of these posts were categorized as misleading messages. The number of relevant posts had not increased much during the first 2 weeks but rose to a high level in the next 2 weeks after the sudden increase in number of reported cases at the beginning of week 3. The posts under “misleading messages” occurred and increased from the beginning of week 3, but their daily posting number decreased when the daily number of posts under “refuting messages” outnumbered them. The microbloggers of the misleading posts had the lowest mean rank of followers and previous posts, but their posts had a highest mean rank of posts. The proportion of “misleading messages” in places with no reported cases was significantly higher than that in the epidemic areas (23.6% vs 13.8%). The popular misleading posts appeared to be short and consisted of personal narratives, which were easily disseminated on social media.ConclusionsOur findings suggested the importance of responding to common questions and misconceptions on social media platforms from the beginning of disease outbreaks. Authorities need to release clear and reliable information related to the popular topics early on. The microbloggers posting correct information should be empowered and their posts could be promoted to clarify false information. Equal importance should be attached to clarify misinformation in both the outbreak and nonoutbreak areas.

The use of social media platforms (e.g. Twitter and Facebook) to raise public awareness towards wildlife conservation is an emerging discussion. However, little is currently known about the propagation pattern of wildlife-related information on social media. In this study, a quantitative model was developed based on 230 independent cetacean stranding incidents (2008–2018) across mainland China from a popular Chinese social media platform (Sina Weibo). This model enabled analysis of the post formation process, identification of the key factors influencing the popularity of the posts and wildlife-related incidents, and allowed investigation of public opinions. The results showed that central media users can increase the overall possibility of elevating incident popularity by ∼75 times, an attractive species or incident by ∼5 times, and a negative social ethics incident by ∼3 times. Traditional media users and celebrity influencers performed key roles in affecting the level of re-posting. Online audiences of highly popular posts predominantly encompassed both users from relatively developed regions and female users. It was observed that posts which became popular within ∼12 h retained their influence for ∼3 d. Post popularity was closely related to comment counts rather than forwarding in the first day of posting and the whole status retention time. Public opinion generally expressed a supportive attitude towards wildlife conservation, but lacked in-depth thinking, and individual responsibility was expressed through revival incidents. In order to raise public awareness towards biodiversity conservation, social media–based wildlife information dissemination should balance the content of attractive and non-charismatic species or incidents and include more positive emotions. Posts via traditional users (especially central media users) and opinion leaders (celebrities) can attract a highly educated audience and females, and thus evoke increased comment numbers during the first day of posting. This will help to popularise conservation knowledge and legislation with continuous efforts.

Over the past decade, there has been a growing focus on the study of how religion and technology intersect, particularly within the field of digital religion studies. In recent years, digital religious activities have emerged on Chinese social media platforms, with the sharing and promotion of content related to religious activities becoming increasingly popular. In a country like China, which adheres to atheistic ideology, the emergence of religious activities among the Generation Z youth provides a unique case for academic research. However, there is very limited research on digital religious behavior in mainland China. This study fills this gap by extending the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) to predict additional influencing factors of digital religious intentions and behavior. This study employed a quantitative design, disseminating surveys via Sina Weibo and the Douyin platform. We collected a total of 525 valid responses. This study aims to deeply explore the social and psychological factors generated by digital religious activities on social media platforms, particularly how they stimulate Chinese Generation Z youth to participate in digital religious activities. The results show that attitudes toward digital religion, perceived behavioral control, social identity, and empathetic willingness are predictors of intentions, while social norms are not. Intentions significantly predict users'behavior on social media platforms such as Weibo and Douyin. Moreover, empathetic willingness and social identity fully mediate the effects of subjective norms, perceived behavioral control, and attitudes on intentions. Consequently, these behaviors generate impact, indicating the presence of multiple mediation effects. Unlike the societal context of theistic nations, there is a pronounced atheistic inclination within Chinese society. Consequently, subjective norms do not influence the digital religious behaviors of Chinese youth. Among contemporary Chinese youth, participation in digital religious practices is a temporary, secular activity undertaken only as a comforting behavior when anxiety becomes unmanageable or surpasses their threshold of tolerance. In contemporary China, young people face immense pressures stemming from workplace competition, social interactions, and economic burdens. Social media offers these young individuals broader opportunities for connection, community formation, and identity construction, as well as various possibilities for organizing their social lives. Consequently, on one hand, they turn to online religious avenues, seeking understanding from others through shared experiences, thereby obtaining emotional solace and comfort. On the other hand, they look to spiritual beliefs to alleviate anxiety, resolve confusion, and gain psychological comfort through emotional exchanges. Therefore, digital religion can, to some extent, be viewed as a form of social-technological empowerment, providing contemporary youth with a new "pressure valve" to facilitate emotional relief, comfort, and tension alleviation.

Social Media in Mainland China: Weak Democracy, Emergent Civil Society

Both social media usage statistics and recent studies outlined the importance for marketers to tap into China’s massive market with rapid growth rate. However, there is limited research focusing on investigating and explaining how the underlying values contribute to the social media usage behavior change. This research is aimed to fill the gap by examining the effect of cultural values on social media usage (e.g., shopping, interaction and information sharing) in China. It also explores the mediating effect of materialism on the relationship between cultural values and social media usage, along the male and female gender categories. While the size and scale of China’s social media market is astonishing, its market composition varies considerably from the rest of the world due to the Chinese government’s Internet censorship. As the study of major Chinese social media sites remains largely unexplored in the literature, this study studied the usage on different social media platforms in China. The survey were conducted online in China in 2018, and a total of 600 usable samples (n = 300 for males; n = 300 for females) were obtained. A principal components factor analysis with quartimax rotation was conducted in this study for a scale reduction purpose. Five cultural dimensions, namely power distance, collectivism/individualism, uncertainty avoidance, masculinity/femininity, and long-term/short-term orientation, were obtained. Then, regression analyses were used to test the hypotheses on main and mediating effects for both male and female social media users. The hypotheses were partially supported. The following summarizes major findings: 1) a significant and substantial effect of materialism on social media usages, as well a significant and moderate effect of cultural values on materialism were observed in this study; 2) the results showed that higher levels of collectivism predict higher levels of social media usage for the purpose of shopping, interaction and sharing information; 3) this study found, only for female users, a positive effect of long-term orientation on social media usage for the purpose of shopping, interaction and sharing information; 4) this study only identified one negative relationship, which is the relationship between power distance and using social media for the purpose of interaction for male users; 5) This study found users in China mainly use social media for information sharing and shopping, but not interaction purpose. Meipai (The Flickr of China), Zhihub(The Quora of China), and Tudou Youku (Youtube of China) were the top three social media sites used to share information such as photos, videos, and knowledges. On the other hand, Baidu Tieba (A Search Engine Forum), Tencent QQ (Popular Instant Messaging App) and Sina Weibo (Twitter of China) were the top 3 platforms people used to research and find product information or shop directly.

BackgroundIn November 2018, a Chinese researcher reported that his team had applied clustered regularly interspaced palindromic repeats or associated protein 9 to delete the gene C-C chemokine receptor type 5 from embryos and claimed that the 2 newborns would have lifetime immunity from HIV infection, an event referred to as #GeneEditedBabies on social media platforms. Although this event stirred a worldwide debate on ethical and legal issues regarding clinical trials with embryonic gene sequences, the focus has mainly been on academics and professionals. However, how the public, especially stratified by geographic region and culture, reacted to these issues is not yet well-understood.ObjectiveThe aim of this study is to examine web-based posts about the #GeneEditedBabies event and characterize and compare the public’s stance across social media platforms with different user bases.MethodsWe used a set of relevant keywords to search for web-based posts in 4 worldwide or regional mainstream social media platforms: Sina Weibo (China), Twitter, Reddit, and YouTube. We applied structural topic modeling to analyze the main discussed topics and their temporal trends. On the basis of the topics we found, we designed an annotation codebook to label 2000 randomly sampled posts from each platform on whether a supporting, opposing, or neutral stance toward this event was expressed and what the major considerations of those posts were if a stance was described. The annotated data were used to compare stances and the language used across the 4 web-based platforms.ResultsWe collected >220,000 posts published by approximately 130,000 users regarding the #GeneEditedBabies event. Our results indicated that users discussed a wide range of topics, some of which had clear temporal trends. Our results further showed that although almost all experts opposed this event, many web-based posts supported this event. In particular, Twitter exhibited the largest number of posts in opposition (701/816, 85.9%), followed by Sina Weibo (968/1140, 84.91%), Reddit (550/898, 61.2%), and YouTube (567/1078, 52.6%). The primary opposing reason was rooted in ethical concerns, whereas the primary supporting reason was based on the expectation that such technology could prevent the occurrence of diseases in the future. Posts from these 4 platforms had different language uses and patterns when they expressed stances on the #GeneEditedBabies event.ConclusionsThis research provides evidence that posts on web-based platforms can offer insights into the public’s stance on gene editing techniques. However, these stances vary across web-based platforms and often differ from those raised by academics and policy makers.

This study proposes a passenger value model based on a social media platform. Using the case of China Southern Airlines on Sina Weibo, this study illustrates how big social data analysis can help an airline company to understand better the passengers and improve customer relationship management. The objectives of this study are threefold: (1) developing a model of passengers' social media value, (2) discussing the possible application scenarios for the proposed model, (3) using sentiment analysis to study the case of China Southern Airlines on Sina Weibo, and illustrating Weibo users' attitudes toward China Southern Airlines. This study also discusses the practical implications for airlines to manage their social media platforms. With the combination of a passenger's social media value and passenger's other offline behavior information, we can establish a comprehensive profile for travelers.

Dynamics of Trends and Attention in Chinese Social Media

The growing scope of technological development and the extent of the specific application of new media in the museum sector are now intrinsic to their promotion, application and operation. Social media, with its large and diverse user group demographics, is an ideal place to disseminate exhibition collections and knowledge worldwide. Many museums now utilise social media by registering on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to share information, interact with visitors and share educational content. Museums further promote their collections by applying shared Creative Commons licensing to images of exhibitions and objects in their collections on websites like Flickr and Pinterest. In China, WeChat and Sina Weibo are the largest social media platforms. This paper will first introduce the current developmental state of digital curation and social media in China. It will analyse Weibo, how art and culture are administered in China as a state function, and how social media is involved. It will then use a case study on the use of exhibitions as part of a WeChat blog strategy. Finally, this paper will seek to propose how soft power and cultural diplomacy can extend within China in the digital age.